Strategies for Restoring Brand-Customer Relationships Following Trust Violations in Live-Streaming Commerce

The burgeoning growth of live-streaming has gained attention, and the way to “persuade” consumers' trust repair intention after trust violation in a live-streaming commerce context is becoming a research focus for scholars. This study develops a theoretical framework to examine the mechanism on the relationship between different trust repair strategies and trust repair intention, and investigate the moderation role of consumer awareness. A questionnaire survey is conducted in China, and the partial least squares equation (PLS-SEM) is used to analyze the data. The empirical results reveal that the forgiveness mediates the relationship between functional repair strategy, affective repair strategy, and trust repair intention. Also, consumer awareness plays a moderation role on the relationship between forgiveness and trust repair intention. However, informative repair strategy is not positively associated with forgiveness. This study extends the field of trust repair in the context of live-streaming commerce.