Impulse Buying in Live-Stream Commerce as a Socioeconomic Challenge: Marketing Mix Stimuli and the Roles of Cognitive and Affective States

Abstract

Impulse buying in live-stream commerce has become one of the emerging socioeconomic challenges of digital markets in developing economies, as real-time promotional pressure and emotionally charged selling may expand unplanned household spending and heighten consumer vulnerability. Research on these socioeconomic challenges has so far concentrated on isolated live-stream cues and single psychological mechanisms such as trust, flow or involvement, leaving the joint operation of seller-controlled people, product, price and promotion cues through parallel cognitive and affective channels unexplained, particularly in Bangladesh. The aim of this study is to determine how four marketing-mix stimuli shape consumers’ cognitive and affective states and, through these organismic states, impulse buying within the stimulus–organism–response framework. The empirical basis is an online survey of Bangladeshi live-stream shoppers conducted from January to March 2026, which yielded 368 valid responses from 404 questionnaires, with 55.71 percent male respondents, 56.79 percent aged 18–25, 54.89 percent students and 44.84 percent holding a postgraduate degree. Data were gathered through a self-administered questionnaire of 22 five-point Likert items under convenience sampling and processed with confirmatory factor analysis, covariance-based structural equation modeling and bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples in Analysis of Moment Structures 26 and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 26. The measurement model showed an acceptable fit, with a chi-square to degrees of freedom ratio of 2.304, a comparative fit index of 0.953 and a root mean square error of approximation of 0.060, while composite reliability ranged from 0.776 to 0.938. Affective state was more strongly associated with impulse buying than cognitive state, with standardized coefficients of 0.469 and 0.288, whereas price (0.462) and people (0.343) were the strongest predictors of affective state and promotion (0.331) of cognitive state, the model explaining 50.8, 23.8 and 37.2 percent of the variance in affective state, cognitive state and impulse buying. Bootstrapped mediation confirmed significant indirect effects of price (0.217) and people (0.161) through affective state and of promotion (0.095) through cognitive state, whereas product showed a negative indirect effect on impulse buying through cognitive state of −0.047, with a 95 percent confidence interval from −0.053 to −0.012. The findings indicate that price and people showed the strongest positive indirect associations with impulse buying through affective state, and they offer live-stream retailers an evidence base for designing transparent pricing and promotional communication while opening avenues for future research on socioeconomic challenges using probability samples, longitudinal designs and behavioral transaction data.