Discussion
This study examined the role of live streaming, which is the latest selling tool for s-commerce sellers. Its real-time nature provides customers with useful, playful, and meaningful shopping experiences that overcome the drawbacks of conventional online shopping. This study analyzed the relationship between live streaming's value and customer trust and engagement with small sellers. Our findings demonstrated different mechanisms by which utilitarian, hedonic, and symbolic values of live streaming are associated with customer trust and engagement. The symbolic value was found to be the only value that has a direct positive impact on customer engagement—indeed, it actually has a stronger impact than trust in influencing customer engagement. This finding is consistent with prior studies in online engagement that have found that customers who feel connected with and perceive relevance of the stimulus (product/brand) to their interest, needs, value (i.e., customer involvement; Zaichkowsky, 1985) are more likely to exhibit a high level of engagement (Arıkan, 2017; Vivek et al., 2012; Wirtz et al., 2013). However, our findings revealed that there is no direct effect of utilitarian and hedonic values on customer engagement. This might be because while utilitarian and hedonic values suggest the current value consumers could obtain from sellers, symbolic value also suggests future benefits based on the perceived similarity between the customer and seller/other customers. This finding is consistent with Bianchi and Andrews (2018), who found that perceptions of the usefulness of and enjoyment from social media are not related to consumers' intention to engage with retail brands through social media.
