Stay With Me: Unveiling the Pathways to Consumer Loyalty in Live Streaming Commerce
Summary
This article (Bai et al., 2025) examines what drives consumer loyalty in live streaming commerce using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Study 1 surveyed 507 participants and applied PLS-SEM and fsQCA to test hypotheses and identify causal configurations. Study 2 used semistructured interviews to deepen understanding and validate quantitative results.
The main finding is a chain of effects: processing fluency (imagery and comprehension) enhances immersion, immersion helps satisfy consumers’ basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), and satisfied needs in turn foster loyalty to streamers/platforms. Self-disclosure by streamers and content transportability moderate these relationships, and fsQCA uncovered four distinct combinations of conditions that can produce loyalty. The qualitative follow-up confirmed these paths and surfaced extra themes for future research.
Key Points
- Method: Mixed methods — survey of 507 (PLS-SEM and fsQCA) + qualitative interviews.
- Processing fluency (imagery & comprehension) increases viewer immersion during streams.
- Immersion leads to satisfaction of basic psychological needs, which drives consumer loyalty.
- Self-disclosure (streamer openness) and transportability (ease of mentally transporting into the stream) moderate effects.
- fsQCA identified four different configurations of factors that can each produce loyalty — there is no single route.
- Practical takeaway: optimise imagery, simplify comprehension, encourage appropriate self-disclosure and design transportable narratives to build lasting viewer loyalty.
Context and relevance
Live commerce is rapidly growing and extremely competitive — viewers switch channels easily. This study links cognitive-affective processes (processing fluency and immersion) with motivational theory (basic psychological needs) to explain loyalty formation. It complements recent industry reports and academic work on engagement, parasocial relationships and platform stickiness by showing both statistical paths and multiple causal recipes (fsQCA) for loyalty.
Why should I read this?
If you work on live commerce, stream content, or design streaming platforms, read this — it tells you what to tweak to keep viewers returning. Short version: make your stream easy to imagine and understand, pull people in, meet their psychological needs, and don’t be afraid to show a bit of yourself at the right time. The paper gives both stats and real interview quotes, so it’s useful whether you’re academic or practical.
Author note
Punchy take: this isn’t just another engagement paper — it connects how viewers process stream content with why they stay. For strategists and streamers wanting actionable levers, the findings are highly relevant; the fsQCA results also warn that different audiences may need different mixes of tactics.
Source
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcs.70118?af=R
