Can time pressure promote consumers' impulse buying in live streaming E-commerce? Moderating effect of product type and consumer regulatory focus

Abstract

Time pressure is one of the most commonly promotion methods in live streaming e-commerce (LSE), but can it promote consumers’ impulse buying? There is no answer, and existing research conclusions in traditional commerce context are inconsistent. Is this impact the same for different types of product and consumers with different characteristics? Existing research cannot give a good answer either. Therefore, based on the Construal Level Theory, adopting the situational questionnaire method, this study explored the impact of time pressure on impulse buying in LSE and the moderating effect of product type (search product and experience product) and consumer regulatory focus (promotion focus and prevention focus). The results show that: (1) Time pressure will promote consumers' impulsive buying. (2) For search product, the impact of time pressure will be enhanced, but the impact will be weakened for experience product. (3) For promotion-focus consumers, the impact of time pressure will be enhanced; but for prevention-focus consumers, the impact will be weakened. These empirically tested the impact of time pressure on consumers’ impulse buying in LSE, and clarified the boundary conditions of this impact. Meanwhile, these can explain the inconsistency of existing research conclusions to a certain extent, which enriches researches on LSE and gives implications for LSE merchants to utilize time pressure better.