Nowadays, livestream shopping has become a new drastically growing segment of e-commerce. Since it’s more interactive and direct comparing to traditional online shopping. It brings benefits for consumers and new opportunities for merchants. Typically, there would be at least one host in a livestream session who is responsible for interacting with consumers. More and more merchants are combining influencer e-commerce and livestream shopping together. They invite influencers as the host to sell products in a live session. This research investigated if the consistency between the influencer’s channel background and the product type would affect people’s attention to promoted products. An eye tracker was used to record people’s visual data during the experiment. This helps quantify people’s attention in a live session. 25 participants in total were recruited for this study. Eye tracking parameters including first fixation duration, total fixation duration, and fixation count were analysed. According to the result, when the host’s background was consistent with the product type, people’s attention to products was not significantly increased. This finding could facilitate the development of live e-commerce. When identifying influencers to promote products in a livestream session, influencer’s channel backgrounds are not critical factors to take into consideration. Merchants may focus on other aspects, such as the number of subscribers or their stickiness. The above findings contributes to the development of the livestream shopping business.

Sheng Haotian, Wang Yubin. An Eye Tracking Study of Live E-commerce: The Impact of Hosts’ Channel Background on Consumers’ Attention to Products. Academic Journal of Business & Management (2023) Vol. 5, Issue 1: 138-142. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJBM.2023.050120.

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