Brands’ Livestream Selling with Influencers’ Converting Fans into Consumers

Baozhuang Niu, Yuyang Chen, Jianhua Zhang, Kanglin Chen and Yong Jin

Omega, 2025, vol. 131, issue C

Abstract: Livestream selling is booming in the digital economy era. In practice, for the benefits such as consumer utility enhancement and the reduction of supply-preference mismatch, many brands are adapting their strategies to livestream selling, wherein some brands cooperate with top influencers to livestream as they can exert efforts to convert the fans into consumers. By contrast, some other brands choose to livestream by themselves to save the commission cost for the influencer, even at the expense of losing fan consumers. In this study, we characterize brands’ key tradeoffs between top influencer-livestream and self-livestream selling strategies. We find that a higher commission rate can incentivize the influencer to exert more efforts to convert fans, but also harms the brand by reducing the proportion of the livestream profit allocated to it and inhibiting it from transferring commission cost to consumers. Therefore, the brand may (not) be suggested to cooperate with the influencer when the commission rate is at a moderate (either low or high) level such that the twofold impacts of the commission rate are balanced (imbalanced). For consumers, their surplus may first decrease and then increase with the influencer commission rate. Our study deepens the understanding of the roles of top influencers and their fans in livestream e-commerce operations.

Keywords: Livestream selling; Consumer utility model; Fan economy; Conversion rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305048324001609
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jomega:v:131:y:2025:i:c:s0305048324001609

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2024.103195

Access Statistics for this article

Omega is currently edited by B. Lev

More articles in Omega from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().