Lost in the Stream: Unravelling the Triggers of Impulsive Buying on Live Shopping Platforms

Live-streaming e-commerce has rapidly emerged as a powerful format that blends real-time interactions, entertainment and product promotion that could shape consumer behaviour. Understanding factors influencing consumers’ impulsive purchase behaviour in a live-streaming context is essential for developing effective strategies and promoting responsible digital consumption. This study applies the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to investigate how external platform features influence consumers’ impulsive buying behaviour. It examines two categories of external stimuli: interaction quality (personalisation, informativeness, professionalism, responsiveness) and technological affordances (visibility, metavoicing, guided shopping). These stimuli are hypothesised to affect internal psychological states that comprises emotional arousal and cognitive immersion, which subsequently drive impulsive purchase intention. Data were collected from 506 respondents in Indonesia via an online survey using the purposive sampling method and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling. The result reveals that arousal emotion and immersion significantly predict impulsive purchase intention. Among the stimuli, personalisation and informativeness significantly influence arousal, while guidance shopping, visibility and metavoicing improve immersion. Interestingly, professionalism and responsiveness did not have a significant effect on arousal. The study advances the theoretical understanding of consumer behaviour in live-streaming by incorporating social interaction quality and technological affordance into the S-O-R framework, especially within the underexplored Indonesian market. The findings contribute to creative communication literature by highlighting how emotionally engaging and interactive mobile environments, shaped by anchor-led storytelling and platform design, influence consumer behaviour. Practical implications are discussed for enhancing mobile branding and emotionally resonant communication in live commerce settings.