Everyone Can Be a Star: Quantifying Grassroots Online Sellers’ Live Streaming Effects on Product Sales

Abstract

Live streaming is becoming prevalent and its rapid rise also makes it an attractive scientific research subject. Despite recent research focuses on understanding the motivations and behavior of people engaging live streaming, we know little about how the adoption of live streaming strategy for e-commerce on product sales. In this paper, we establish a causal relationship between adopting live streaming strategy for e-commerce and online product sales. Our results indicate that there is a 21.8% increase in online sales volume after adopting live streaming strategy. Furthermore, we find live streaming strategy is more efficient for the sellers who mainly sell experience goods--they have 27.9% more than those whose products are mainly search goods. This work is the first quantitative study, to our knowledge, on how the adoption of live streaming strategy on online product sales.