When Ziwei Cong bought some sweatpants that caught her eye during a livestream shopping event on social media, she was disappointed when they arrived and didn’t fit well.
“It’s very easy for me to become irrational during these kinds of shopping events,” says the assistant professor of marketing at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She adds that the hosts can be very persuasive and hook you with limited-time offers to trigger impulse purchases.
Social shopping, or purchases made through social media sites that sometimes incorporate livestreaming events with influencers, is booming. Almost half of U.S. consumers (47 percent) say they’ve made a purchase on social media, and 39 percent say they have bought that way and would do so again, according to 2022 data in a report released in April by the market intelligence agency Mintel….