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Yanwen Wang

University of British Columbia

Sales Impact of Live Streaming

Date: Friday, April 19, 2024
Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: Bronfman building, Room 410

Abstract

This research investigates the sales impact of live-streaming videos. We estimate the impact of live-streaming activities on sales for 167 apparel brands by merging the brands’ product-level national sales with a complete record of product-level live-streaming activities from a leading online marketplace. Our empirical analysis suggests that live-streaming videos on e-commerce platforms have a positive sales impact on 81.44% of brands, no sales impact on 14.37% of brands and a negative sales impact on the remaining 4.19%. We show that one extra live-streaming video to showcase a product results in a median 22.9% increase in the product’s daily sales. Brand strength moderates the live-streaming effects. We further investigate the sales impact of communication strategies employed by live-streamers in a subset of videos. Specifically, we focus on three types of sales pitches: product, promotion, and customer relationship management (CRM). We develop an automated, deep-learning-based framework to extract granular textual, visual, and vocal features from 3,057 live product videos broadcasted by 111 live-streamers. Our findings indicate that the usage of product sales pitches significantly impacts live-streaming sales, such that on average, a 10% increase in the ratio of product-related content to CRM-related content triggers an 13.7% increase in live-streaming sales. This sales lift of product-related content, however, wanes as the follower size of live-streamers decreases. In contrast, the sales lift of promotion-related content is contingent on discount depth, such that promotion sales pitches boost sales only given the presence of substantial discounts. Our research takes the initiative to evaluate the communication strategies utilized in live commerce.

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