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Will a technology-featured authentic shopping environment motivate participants’ purchasing behavior in tourism live-streamed shopping?

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Abstract

Live-streamed shopping is experiencing explosive growth in the tourism industry, yet few studies have investigated purchase behaviours from a technology-featured authenticity perspective. This study aims to explore what factors may affect viewers’ purchase of tourism products from the perspective of authenticity. A sequential mixed-method design was adopted. Data were collected from 403 real-time live streaming events and 15 interviewees. The findings posited that the technology-featured shopping environment in tourism live-streamed shopping (TLSS) contains constructive, postmodern, existential, and objective authenticity attributes, echoing previous theoretical approaches to authenticity. The results also indicate that there is a significant correlation between authentic attributes and sales performance, while the degree of influence varies from dimensions of authenticity. This research extends our knowledge of TLSS by uncovering the role of authenticity dimensions in technology-featured authentic shopping environments. Our results also deliver key insights into the influence of authenticity, providing a deeper understanding for operators and marketers to position live-streamed shopping products in tourism and hospitality strategies.

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Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions. The assistance offered by Even Zhang and Soda Jiang in the completion of this paper is sincerely appreciated. The first author extends heartfelt thanks to her newborn baby, Joe, for patiently providing quiet companionship throughout the entirety of this drafting process.

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  1. Shanghai Business School, Shanghai, China

    Xueyan(Even) Xu

  2. Tourism School, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

    Jiahui Huang & Dan Huang

  3. Institute of Tianhua, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Xinyu Shang

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  1. Xueyan(Even) Xu
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Correspondence to Dan Huang.

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Appendices

Appendix A. Examples of tourism live-streamed shopping

figure a

Appendix B. Examples of TLSS studio setting

figure b

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Xu, X., Huang, J., Huang, D. et al. Will a technology-featured authentic shopping environment motivate participants’ purchasing behavior in tourism live-streamed shopping?. Inf Technol Tourism 25, 635–663 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-023-00265-w

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