Against the backdrop of the rapid development of global digital trade, cross-border e-commerce live streaming has emerged as a crucial marketing model connecting brands and consumers. Its real-time interactivity and immersive communication characteris...
Against the backdrop of the rapid development of global digital trade, cross-border e-commerce live streaming has emerged as a crucial marketing model connecting brands and consumers. Its real-time interactivity and immersive communication characteristics create a dynamic psychological decision-making structure distinct from that of traditional e-commerce. As a core psychological perception variable in live-streaming contexts, social presence directly influences consumers’ cognitive processing and emotional responses, thereby shaping their online purchase intention. Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model and social presence theory, this study systematically explores the mechanism through which social presence affects consumers’ online purchase intention via flow experience and perceived usefulness, while incorporating live-streaming type (human streamer vs. virtual streamer) as a moderating variable to construct and validate a comprehensive theoretical model.
Using consumers with cross-border live-streaming viewing experience as research participants, a total of 522 valid responses were collected through a structured questionnaire. Reliability and validity tests, correlation and regression analyses, as well as mediation and moderation tests were conducted using SPSS and AMOS. The results reveal that: (1) the three-dimensional structure of social presence (co-presence, communication presence, and emotional presence) has a significant positive effect on both flow experience and perceived usefulness, indicating that authentic interactive atmospheres can effectively enhance consumers’ engagement depth and information evaluation ability; (2) both flow experience and perceived usefulness significantly and positively predict consumers’ online purchase intention, suggesting that in cross-border live-streaming contexts, consumers’ focused engagement and cognitive assessment jointly drive their purchasing decisions; (3) flow experience and perceived usefulness play partial mediating roles between social presence and online purchase intention, revealing a sequential transmission mechanism in which emotional immersion leads to cognitive evaluation and ultimately influences purchase intention; (4) live-streaming type exerts a partial moderating effect on the paths from social presence to flow experience and perceived usefulness, with stronger positive effects observed under human streamer conditions. This indicates that the presence of “human” attributes remains irreplaceable in fostering trust and enhancing perceived presence.
Theoretically, this study enriches and extends the applicability of the S-O-R model within cross-border digital consumption contexts by constructing a multi-layered psychological framework that integrates social presence, flow experience, and perceived usefulness. Furthermore, by incorporating live-streaming type into the social presence framework, it innovatively identifies the psychological boundaries of consumers under conditions of technological evolution. Practically, the findings provide empirical insights for cross-border e-commerce enterprises to optimize live-streaming content design, enhance user interaction experiences, and improve purchase conversion rates. By cultivating multidimensional social presence, strengthening flow experience, and enhancing perceived usefulness, firms can achieve higher levels of brand communication effectiveness and market performance across diverse cultural and technological contexts.
This study offers significant theoretical and practical implications for advancing consumer psychology research in cross-border e-commerce live streaming, extending social presence theory in the digital economy era, and optimizing international live-streaming marketing strategies.