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1. Introduction
With the increasing popularity of information communication and network technology, e-services are playing an increasingly important role in more and more industries. Currently, COVID-19 broke out globally and has made an unprecedented impact on economic activity (Barro et al., 2020). People are encouraged to keep social distance with others and work at home to mitigate the risk of infection (Jones et al., 2020). How to promote e-service strategies is particularly important to achieve the goals of attracting customers, managing customer relationship and gaining online market competition (Ha et al., 2014). Nowadays, online shopping has become the mainstream consumption method, but customers’ growing demand for high-quality online service has not been satisfied by the traditional communication methods based on graphics and texts (Huang et al., 2019). E-commerce websites and e-retailers are trying to apply new e-service marketing strategies to improve customer online purchase intention.
As a special type of video-based social media, live streaming has become a global social phenomenon in recent years (Hu et al., 2017). YouTube announced that as of June 2018, it had over 1.8 billion monthly logged-in users and more than 30 million daily active users. Currently, major e-commerce websites, such as Tmall.com and JD.com, have adopted live streaming in China. With the help of e-commerce live streaming, e-retailers can show the product details from different standpoints, try on the clothes, interact with customers in real time and demonstrate how products are produced. As live streaming has increasingly been used to promote products to potential customers, the competition among e-commerce live streaming retailers has become more intense. Therefore, the effective use of e-commerce live streaming service to enhance customer purchase intention is a vital way to gain a competitive advantage.
Prior studies have found that interpersonal relationship is essential to create an additional bond that ties the customers to the retailers and drives transaction behaviour (Netzer et al., 2008; Macintosh, 2002). In the Chinese business context, a relationship is known as guanxi (Shi et al., 2018). Owing to the collectivistic culture of China, to compensate for disadvantages in the institutional environment, firms rely more on guanxi connections (Hofstede, 1980). In the online marketplace, Ou et al. (2014) proposed the concept of swift guanxi