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1. Introduction
Although online shopping has become increasingly common (Huang and Zhou, 2019), customers may get a product different from what they expected (e.g., a low-quality product or a fake), which leads to barriers to building trust (Chen and Wang, 2019). Recently, the unique characteristic and popularity of live streaming attract many practitioners to use it to enhance customers' immersion experience, reduce uncertainty (Wongkitrungrueng and Assarut, 2018) and assist in online shopping (Sun et al., 2019). This leads to a new form of social commerce (s-commerce), namely, live streaming commerce (Cai and Donghee, 2019), such as Taobao Live. According to the Alibaba Q2 financial report for the fiscal year 2020, the number of monthly active users on Taobao Live has risen to 785 million. It fulfilled nearly 20 billion transactions on November 11, 2019.
Despite the increasing popularity of live streaming commerce, only a few researches have focused on the phenomenon. The majority of prior studies explored the drivers of customer behavior either from customer factors' perspective, such as motivation (Cai et al., 2018), perceived value (Wongkitrungrueng and Assarut, 2018), or from platform factors' perspective, such as IT affordance (Sun et al., 2019), and relational bonds (Hu and Chaudhry, 2020), rather than the relationship between customers and other factors on the platform, especially like customer trust. Only a limited number of studies has shed light on this. For example, Wongkitrungrueng and Assarut (2018) focused on the relationship between customer trust and engagement in live streaming commerce. In fact, the trust relationship among every entity may be changed and transferred in live streaming commerce. Nevertheless, how to build customer trust in live streaming commerce, and how the altered trust influences customers' attitude and behavior for value co-creation are still unclear.
Compared with s-commerce, customer trust-building in live streaming commerce are different in two ways. First, the authenticity and visualization of live streaming commerce help customers build trust (Hu and Chaudhry, 2020). In traditional s-commerce, customers cannot see the real products (Lu et al., 2016), making them vulnerable to be cheated by inauthentic and beautified information and may hinder trust-building (Escobar-Rodríguez and Bonsón-Fernández, 2017). Conversely, live streaming commerce platforms allow broadcasters to present the most authentic products from different angles and demonstrate their...