Why Watching Feels Like Buying: The Psychology Behind Livestream Shopping Decisions

Livestream shopping has exploded from a niche experiment into one of the fastest-growing forms of digital commerce, blending entertainment, social interaction, and instant purchasing into a single scrolling experience. Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in Vietnam, one of the world’s most dynamic emerging online markets, where live-selling sessions routinely draw thousands of simultaneous viewers who comment, react, and buy in real time. Yet despite the commercial stakes, researchers have struggled to explain exactly how a viewer’s psychological journey unfolds from the moment they open a livestream to the moment they decide to purchase. A new study published in Discover Psychology offers one of the most detailed maps yet of that journey, and its findings carry implications far beyond Vietnamese borders.

The research, led by Tuyen Kim Thi Dinh and Minh Pham of Ho Chi Minh City Open University together with colleagues from the university’s School of Advanced Study, set out to fill a persistent gap in the literature. Previous studies of livestream commerce had examined individual factors that drive purchase intention, but they paid limited attention to the integrated psychological process by which cognitive evaluations transform into emotional responses and, ultimately, behavioral intentions. To capture that process, the team turned to a classic theoretical structure from environmental and consumer psychology: the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework, often abbreviated as CAB.

The CAB framework rests on a deceptively simple idea. When people encounter an environment, whether a physical store or a digital space, they first form cognitive appraisals of it, then generate affective or emotional reactions, and finally produce behavioral responses such as approaching, staying, or buying. Applied to livestream commerce, the cognitive layer includes how useful viewers perceive the platform to be, how easy they find it to use, and how strongly they feel transported into the scene, a sensation researchers call perceived telepresence. The affective layer is captured by perceived enjoyment, the pleasure viewers derive simply from watching. The behavioral layer is purchase intention, the self-reported likelihood of buying through the livestream.

To test this model, the researchers surveyed 489 Vietnamese consumers who had watched livestreams and intended to purchase through them. The sample skewed female, was concentrated in Southern Vietnam, and was highly educated, a demographic profile that mirrors the core audience of livestream selling platforms in the region. The team then applied structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to test networks of hypothesized relationships simultaneously, estimating both direct paths between variables and indirect pathways that run through mediating constructs. This approach is particularly well suited to frameworks like CAB, where the theoretical interest lies not just in whether individual factors matter but in how they chain together.

The results were striking in their clarity. Three factors emerged as direct, statistically significant drivers of purchase intention: perceived telepresence, perceived enjoyment, and perceived ease of use. In other words, viewers who felt present in the livestream environment, who found the experience fun, and who found the technology effortless were all more likely to say they would buy. Telepresence deserves particular emphasis. In a livestream, the sensation of being there, watching a host demonstrate a product, answer questions, and respond to comments in real time, appears to do psychological work that static product pages cannot replicate. The study’s authors argue that their findings clarify the role of perceived telepresence in this context, positioning it as a central cognitive ingredient of the livestream experience rather than a peripheral novelty.

Perceived usefulness told a subtler story. It did not exert a direct, statistically meaningful effect on purchase intention on its own. Instead, its influence ran through enjoyment: viewers who found the livestream useful became more engaged and entertained, and that heightened enjoyment in turn lifted their intention to buy. This mediated pathway is a technically important finding because it suggests that usefulness in livestream commerce is not consumed coldly, as a rational calculation of value, but is converted into emotional currency before it shapes behavior. A host who provides genuinely informative product demonstrations does not merely inform the audience; the information makes the show more enjoyable, and the enjoyment sells the product.

Perhaps the most intriguing result concerned expectation confirmation, the degree to which the experience matches what viewers anticipated. Rather than acting as a direct driver, expectation confirmation operated as a moderator, specifically of the relationship between perceived ease of use and purchase intention. In practical terms, this means that the payoff of a smooth, frictionless viewing experience depends on whether the livestream lives up to expectations. When expectations are confirmed, ease of use translates more powerfully into purchase intention; when they are not, even a technically seamless experience may fail to convert viewers into buyers. This moderating role had not been clearly established in prior livestream research, and the authors highlight it as a key contribution of the study.

Methodologically, the research was conducted with careful attention to ethical standards. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Ho Chi Minh City Open University, with approval number 1644/QD-DHM issued on August 4, 2025, and all participants were informed about the purpose and procedures of the study and provided informed consent before taking part. The authors declare no competing interests, and the article is published open access under a Creative Commons license, making the full technical detail of the model available to researchers and practitioners worldwide.

The theoretical significance of the work lies in its extension of the CAB framework into livestream commerce, a domain the framework had rarely been applied to in integrated form. By demonstrating that cognitive appraisals feed emotional responses which then drive behavioral intentions, and by specifying where moderators like expectation confirmation intervene, the study offers a coherent psychological architecture for understanding digital consumer decision-making. It also situates that architecture in an emerging market context, where livestream commerce is growing rapidly and where most existing theory, built largely on Western e-commerce data, has been untested. The Vietnamese sample, dominated by young, educated, female consumers in the country’s south, provides a valuable data point for a global literature that has often overlooked such markets.

The practical implications are equally concrete. For platform designers, the primacy of telepresence and enjoyment suggests that investment should flow toward features that deepen immersion and delight, such as high-quality video, interactive overlays, responsive comment systems, and charismatic host training, rather than toward interface complexity. For sellers and hosts, the mediated role of usefulness implies that informative content is not optional; it is the raw material from which enjoyment is built. And for marketers, the moderating effect of expectation confirmation delivers a cautionary lesson: overpromising in promotional material can backfire, because unmet expectations blunt the conversion power of an otherwise effortless experience. As livestream commerce expands across emerging online markets, the study suggests that the platforms that thrive will be those that understand a simple psychological truth, that people do not buy from streams they merely watch, but from streams that make them feel present, capable, and genuinely entertained.

Subject of Research: Consumer psychology of purchase intention in livestream commerce using the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework

Article Title: Understanding purchase intention in livestream commerce through the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework

Article References: Dinh, T. K. T., Doan, B. T. T., Tran, T. B. N., Vo, L. T. N., Pham, D. N., Dinh, T. M. N., & Pham, M. (2026). Understanding purchase intention in livestream commerce through the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00911-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00911-4

Keywords: livestream commerce, purchase intention, Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework, perceived telepresence, perceived enjoyment, perceived ease of use, expectation confirmation, structural equation modeling, consumer behavior, Vietnam, emerging markets, cyberpsychology