Beyond Shopping: The Motivations and Experience of Live Stream Shopping Viewers

We present a study of viewers of live stream shopping – a new medium that blends aspects of social media with mobile shopping. 286 participants from China, where live stream shopping has gained tremendous popularity with hundreds of millions of active users, were surveyed about their attitudes and experiences with viewing, interacting with, and making purchases from live stream shopping. Viewer motivations were examined according to the Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) to identify motivations broken down into sixteen constructs organized under four greater constructs: entertainment, information, socialization, and experience. Many of the motivations we examined revealed statistically significant correlations with the frequency with which users viewed and made purchases from live stream shopping. Open-ended questions were also included for further analysis. Based on our findings, we propose suggestions to use live stream shopping as a powerful tool for e-commerce while taking advantage of the entertainment and real-time features that make it a form of social media.