Two Streams to Success: Unpacking the Informational and Relational Roles of Live Streaming in Online Shopping

The growing prominence of live streaming has attracted the attention from both e-commerce practitioners and the research community. This paper investigates the impact of online retailers adopting live streaming technology in business operations on their product sales, dissecting dual roles of live streaming: information provision and customer relationship management. Leveraging multiple archival data sources, we combine econometrics with deep learning to analyze the nuanced, dual roles of live streaming in online retail. Specifically, we develop a novel deep-learning framework to identify two types of live streaming strategies, product-oriented and nonproduct-oriented, and find that both strategies significantly increase online product sales. Notably, our research suggests that past review volume and product visual informativeness substitute the impact of using product-oriented live streaming; whereas seller's rating and product visual informativeness complement the impact of using nonproduct-oriented live streaming. These results suggest that product-oriented live streaming increases sales by reducing product uncertainty via information provision, whereas nonproduct-oriented live streaming increases sales via noninformation mechanisms, such as enhancing customer relationship management.