Promoting or attenuating? An eye-tracking study on the role of social cues in e-commerce livestreaming

Abstract Unlike general e-business, e-commerce livestreaming innovatively enables anchors to use instant social functions to communicate with viewers and present products in more vivid ways. However, little research has been done to understand the effects of social cues in e-commerce livestreaming. Drawing on stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory, we develop a two-phase research framework to examine how two widely used social cues (i.e., herding message and interaction text) can affect viewers' attention allocation procedure and purchase intention when watching e-commerce livestreaming. We also propose that anchor characteristics (i.e., attractiveness) may moderate the effects of social cues. To examine the above effects, we conduct a within-subject eye-tracking experiment. Using generalized linear mixed-effects models, we find that both herding message and interaction text can capture exogenous attention. In terms of endogenous attention to the product and anchor, interaction text shows a negative distracting effect, whereas herding message shows a positive spillover effect, negatively moderated by anchor attractiveness. Moreover, endogenous attention is positively related to purchase intention, while the effect of exogenous attention is relatively more complex, involving the competing mechanisms of the distracting effect and social influence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.