Beyond Words: How Streamers’ Dynamic Nonverbal Cues Increase Consumer Purchase Behavior Through Viewer Immersion

Live-streaming commerce has become a routine channel for merchants, and streamers’ nonverbal cues are closely associated with consumer responses and conversion. Drawing on real live-streaming settings, this study examined the relationship between streamers’ nonverbal cues and consumer purchase behavior, and further tested whether immersion, as reflected by average watch time, helped explain this relationship. Building on Social Cognitive Theory, we constructed a multimodal dataset of 4600 product-presentation segments from 546 live sessions. Using an automated computer-vision-based framework, we measured segment-level nonverbal behaviors, including nodding frequency, gesture intensity, postural movement intensity, forward lean, and camera proximity. We then examined how these nonverbal cues were associated with consumer purchase behavior and through what mechanisms in live-streaming settings. The results showed that each nonverbal cue was positively and significantly associated with consumer purchase behavior. Mediation tests further indicated that immersion significantly helped explain the relationships between nonverbal cues and consumer purchase behavior. From a process perspective, this study extends the range of constructs examined in live-streaming commerce and clarifies how nonverbal communication is associated with outcomes, offering practical implications for streamer training, camera setup, and content design.