From Watching to Buying: A Netnographic Study of Impulsive Buying Behavior on TikTok and Shopee Live Shopping

Abstract

The rapid growth of live commerce has reshaped Indonesian consumers’ purchasing behavior, encouraging impulsive purchases even among viewers who initially had no intention to buy. Prior studies on impulsive buying in live-streaming commerce have been dominated by quantitative approaches, leaving the in-the-moment social and emotional processes that precede a purchase underexplored. This study aims to explore how and why viewers with no prior purchase intention are drawn into impulsive buying during TikTok Live and Shopee Live sessions, focusing on the roles of social presence, scarcity, and emotion (pleasure and arousal). A netnographic approach was employed, comprising nonintervening observation of live-shopping sessions in the fashion, skincare, and makeup categories, documentation of the comment column, and in-depth interviews with 9 informants who experienced impulsive purchases. Data were analyzed thematically in NVivo using a word frequency query and a matrix coding query. The word frequency analysis showed that host utterances marked by intimate address terms such as “kakak” and “sayang,” together with urgency cues such as “boleh,” “ambil,” and “langsung,” dominated the discourse of the sessions, reflecting strong communication and emotional presence. The matrix coding query further showed that product scarcity and arousal exhibited the strongest co-occurrence with impulsive-buying references, particularly the emotional-impulse type, while social togetherness and payment convenience played a comparatively minor role. These findings provide a qualitative foundation for the subsequent quantitative validation of a social presence-scarcity-emotion-impulsive buying model and offer practical implications for digital business and SME live-selling strategies.