Dumb Smiles: How Positive Emotions Negatively Influence Purchase Intentions in Live Shopping

Social commerce and live shopping are on the rise. Major retailer across the globe have started marketing their products on live streams directly to billions of customers. Still, live shopping has not yet received much attention in marketing research. In this article, we build upon findings from service and marketing research to study the role of the salesperson in live shopping. In an online experiment, we show that the excessive expression of positive emotions trough smiling negatively affects perceived expertise of the salesperson and purchase intentions for the advertised hedonic product. For utilitarian products, we find no influence of positive emotions on purchase intentions. Implications for research and practice are being discussed.