Boosting e-commerce sales with live streaming: A perspective on live streamers’ personality traits

In live streaming e-commerce, streamers employ distinct styles such as humor or fervor to explain products and attract consumers to purchase them. Streamers with different personality traits give viewers a different viewing experience, which in turn affects sales performance. Personality traits play a crucial role in the cultivation and promotion of streamers, as well as in the company's selection process for streamers. However, few studies have examined the effect of streamers' personality traits on live streaming sales performance. Using a dataset from 100 live streaming rooms in a leading Chinese live streaming platform and text mining and econometric methods to analyze streamer speech, we find that: (1) Neuroticism and openness have a positive impact on sales performance; (2) For celebrity streamer, extroversion and agreeableness appear to be more important; (3) The extroversion personality trait of high-following streamers positively affects sales, whereas openness negatively affects sales. This study gives suggestions for streamers to improve their abilities, provides more scientific basis for companies to screen streamers, and lays the foundation for future research.