Get inspired and pay for the goods: An investigation of customer inspiration and purchase intention in livestream shopping

Livestream shopping, a novel business model, has demonstrated great potential in social media marketing. Unlike traditional live broadcasting, livestream shopping enables real-time interactions between online streamers and customers and creates an immersive and inspiring space for transactions. This study investigates how livestream shopping cultivates customer inspiration and enhances customer engagement. Our results show that states of inspiration positively influenced customers' intention to engage in livestream shopping. Customer inspiration consisted of two interrelated stages – “inspired by†and “inspired to.†The state “inspired by†was triggered by external stimuli, while the state “inspired to†exerted influence on consumers’ motivational intentions. Our results suggest that, during streamer-viewer interactions in livestream shopping, content-related characteristics (i.e., content diagnosticity, vicarious expression, and source credibility) and scene-related characteristics (i.e., social presence and telepresence) significantly facilitated customer inspiration. This study enriches our understanding of the role of inspiration in livestream shopping and social media marketing, and offers practical insights for the streamers and marketers of livestream shopping platforms.