The Sales Impact of Storytelling in Live Streaming E-Commerce

Live streaming e-commerce (LSE) has emerged as a popular third-party service for improving product sales. It persuades consumers through streamers’ storytelling or narratives, which encompass descriptions and depictions of their own product experiences. However, the sales impact of a story or narrative in LSEs has been overlooked in the literature. Extending the narrative transportation theory to the LSE context, we posit that the dual landscapes of narrative—the landscapes of action and the landscape of consciousness—can improve product sales through their influence on consumers’ imagination of story plotline and empathy for streamers’ product experiences. We also propose that the efficacy of the dual landscapes is contingent on streamers’ interaction response to consumer query. By collecting LSE data from the Taobao Live platform, we manually and algorithmically measured these variables and proposed to empirically examine their effects.