Promoting or hindering? Understanding the effects of multicommunicating on customer engagement into e-commerce livestreaming

E-commerce livestreaming innovatively transforms interactions between sellers and consumers. Customers can participate into multiple conversations by watching live video and exchanging danmaku messages simultaneously, which is known as the multicommunicating phenomenon. Although previous studies found the negative effect of multicommunicating on customer engagement behavior, in practice many platforms have created the multicommunicating context by allowing customers to communicate with different people at the same time. The inconsistency between theory and practice needs more evidence to verify the complicated effects of multicommunicating. To answer the question, we collected 476 questionnaires as data and applied structural equation model method to test the hypothesis. The research findings revealed that multicommunicating can positively impact customer engagement through social presence and negatively impact customer engagement through information overload; communicating consistency as communicating feature and online interaction propensity as customer feature can moderate the impacts of multicommunicating. These findings contribute to multicommunicating theory, which only focus on the negative effect of multicommunicating but ignore the positive effect, and can offer some practical suggestions to platforms and anchors.