Enhancing Purchase Intention in E-Commerce Live Streaming: The Moderating Role of Narrative Transportation

Live streaming commerce has emerged as a dominant force in China’s e-commerce landscape, driven by its immersive and interactive nature. While prior studies emphasize the roles of product quality and promotional strategies, the interplay between entertainment, psychological engagement (e.g., flow experience), and narrative strategies in shaping consumer behavior remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by integrating Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) theory and flow theory to investigate how live streaming characteristics influence purchase intentions. The study aims to examine the direct effect of live streaming entertainment on consumers’ flow, analyze the role of flow in translating entertainment into purchase intentions, and elucidate how narrative transportation moderates the relationship between entertainment and flow. Empirical analysis confirms that entertainment provided through streamer performance, interactive features, and engaging content significantly enhances consumers’ flow state. This heightened flow state, which is characterized by deep concentration and detachment from distractions, subsequently exerts a strong positive influence on purchase intention. Furthermore, the study reveals that narrative transportation acts as a significant positive moderator: effective storytelling techniques strengthen the relationship between entertainment and flow. These findings advance theoretical understanding by integrating narrative transportation theory into the S-O-R model for live streaming, highlighting the interplay between hedonic stimuli, psychological immersion, and narrative form. Practically, the results offer actionable insights: businesses and platforms should prioritize streamer training in performance, incorporate interactive entertainment elements, tailor content to audience demographics, optimize technical quality for seamless immersion, and leverage narrative techniques to amplify the entertainment-flow link, thereby boosting consumer engagement and purchase conversion rates.