Digital strategies and consumer engagement in fashion livestream commerce: A cross-market analysis
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DOIhttp://dx.doi.org/10.21511/im.22(2).2026.09
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Article InfoVolume 22 2026, Issue #2, pp. 119-131
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Type of the article: Research Article
Abstract
Livestream commerce has become an increasingly important channel in digital fashion retail because it integrates entertainment, interaction, and real-time purchasing within a single shopping environment. This study aimed to examine how four digital marketing strategy elements — presenter type, layout design, interactivity features, and call-to-action timing — affect consumer engagement, interactivity, and purchase behavior in fashion livestream commerce across the Gulf region (the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) and Singapore. The study used a contextual multi-armed bandit design across 25 live fashion sessions, generating more than 12,000 usable impressions from approximately 1,500 unique viewers, and estimated causal effects using doubly robust estimation with session-clustered inference. The results show that influencer- or celebrity-led sessions increased engagement by 0.9 minutes relative to staff-led sessions and improved purchase consideration by 0.5 points. Dynamic overlay layouts increased interactivity by 6.5 actions, while interactive features raised add-to-bag outcomes by 3.4 percentage points. Mid-stream call-to-action placement outperformed early and late placement, improving add-to-bag outcomes by approximately 4-5 percentage points. Mediation analysis further showed a significant indirect effect of engagement on add-to-bag through interactivity of 1.2 percentage points. Cross-market comparisons revealed that presenter effects were stronger in the Gulf, whereas layout and timing effects were stronger in Singapore. The findings conclude that effective livestream commerce performance depends on the alignment of presenter credibility, interface design, interactivity, and action timing within specific market contexts.
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JEL Classification (Paper profile tab)M31, L81, C44, O33
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References63
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Tables10
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Figures1
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- Figure 1. Conceptual framework
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- Table 1. Study design: treatment factors, conditions, and data sources
- Table 2. Sample profile by market, device use, and repeat-viewing status
- Table 3. Descriptive statistics of the main engagement, interactivity, and purchase outcomes
- Table 4. Mean engagement, interactivity, add-to-bag, and consideration outcomes by experimental condition
- Table 5. Estimated treatment effects relative to baseline conditions across the main study outcomes
- Table 6. Summary of hypothesis test results for the direct, moderated, and mediated effects
- Table 7. Indirect effects of engagement on purchase-related outcomes through interactivity
- Table 8. Cross-market comparison of treatment effects in the Gulf region and Singapore
- Table 9. Heterogeneous treatment effects by viewer segment and product category
- Table 10. Robustness and sensitivity checks for the main empirical results
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