Understanding the Effects of the Multidimensional Content of Streamers’ Live Speech on Consumer Purchase Behavior in Livestreaming E-commerce: Empirical Evidence from TikTok

Livestreaming e-commerce has emerged as an effective way of facilitating consumer purchase decisions. Moreover, streamers play a crucial role in promoting product sales through live speech. Existing research has focused primarily on the effects of streamers’ competencies, linguistic characteristics, and social interaction-oriented content on purchase decisions by analyzing streamers’ conversation content, ignoring the differential impact of multidimensional content. Therefore, this study identifies and examines how the multidimensional content of streamers’ live speech influences consumer purchase behavior in livestreaming e-commerce, with a particular focus on the moderating role of streamer influence. By analyzing a fine-grained dataset comprising 1,030 livestreaming events of 582 streamers from TikTok and matching them with actual sales transactions, a negative binominal regression model is used to estimate the research model, and the results show that product and social information contained in streamer conversation content has an inverted U-shaped relationship with consumer purchase behavior, while emotional information has a negative linear relationship with consumer purchase behavior. Furthermore, streamer influence significantly and positively moderates the effects of streamers’ conversation content (product, social and emotional information) on consumer purchase behavior. This research establishes the paramount role of streamers’ multidimensional conversation content in customer purchase behavior, lending credence to the epistemological applicability of persuasion theory in the context of livestreaming e-commerce. The study’s findings offer some practical implications for developing conversation content in the context of livestreaming e-commerce.