The Moderating Effect of Celebrity Endorsement on the Relationship between Browsing and Impulse Buying Behavior

Abstract

With the improvement of the information technology, the online shopping and livestreaming are well accepted by many consumers. Livestreaming have attracted many users in China. In 2020, China's live broadcast e-commerce market has reached 961 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth of 121.5% and the overall user scale has reached 587 million. This trend has triggered a new shopping behavior which is called impulse buying. Impulse buying is an unplanned, spontaneous purchase activity with less deliberation, less compare with alternative selection and self-oriented decision. Browsing is the most important step for impulse buying. Nowadays, the celebrities are livestreaming to sell the products which leads their fans to join the livestreaming as viewers. The increased browsing behavior can lead to high impulse buying behavior. There are studies on the relationship between browsing and impulse buying behavior. However, the relationship is not consistent such as browsing in Facebook commerce has no positive effect on the impulse buying. Meanwhile, with the celebrities are getting into the livestreaming industry, hence, the impact of celebrity endorsement on the livestreaming industry is worth to investigate further. The objective of this paper is to propose a framework to find out the relationship between browsing and impulse buying behavior. In addition, due to browsing has no consistent relationship with impulse buying, this paper will try to propose the moderating effect of the celebrity endorsement on the relationship between browsing and impulse buying behavior. To collect the data, a questionnaire will be designed to collect the information from real livestreaming platform users of different age brackets and different occupations in mainland China. Further, pilot test will be used to improve the reliability and validity of the questionnaire items. Structural equation modeling will be used for data analysis. This study is expected to investigate the relationship between browsing and impulse buying behavior in the content of online shopping, as well as which factors have the direct positive effect on the impulse buying behavior. In addition, through literature review, the moderating effect of the celebrity endorsement on the relationship between browsing and impulse buying can be justifiable. Clearly, the online shopping has emerged in the past decade and impulse buying has taken a large part of total purchasing behavior through the internet. Thus, this study is important to help the sellers and marketers to implement more efficient strategies to enhance the impulse buying of their customers through browsing and celebrity endorsement for better sales and market share.