How Live-Streaming Shopping Features Shape Consumer Purchase Intention in Guangdong Province: The Mediating Role of Customer Perceived Value and the Moderating Role of Anticipated Regret

Live-streaming shopping has become one of the fastest-growing retail formats in China, yet prior research has often examined isolated platform features rather than the broader configuration of stimuli that structure consumer judgement in real time. This study compresses the original doctoral thesis into a journal-style article and investigates how six live-streaming shopping features—interactivity, visualization, entertainment, professionalism, real-time nature, and sociability—influence consumer purchase intention in Guangdong Province. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, Perceived Value Theory, and Regret Theory, the study tests customer perceived value as a mediator and anticipated regret as a moderator. A quantitative cross-sectional survey generated 498 valid responses from Guangdong consumers with recent live-streaming shopping experience, and the model was estimated with PLS-SEM using SmartPLS 4.1. The results show that all six features have significant positive effects on purchase intention, with professionalism producing the strongest direct effect (β = 0.141, p < 0.001), followed by interactivity (β = 0.131, p = 0.001) and visualization (β = 0.128, p = 0.001). Customer perceived value partially mediates all six relationships, with indirect effects ranging from 0.029 to 0.047. The structural model explains 54.5% of the variance in purchase intention and 49.4% of the variance in customer perceived value, with strong predictive relevance (Q² = 0.431 and 0.367, respectively). Anticipated regret significantly weakens the positive effect of customer perceived value on purchase intention (β = -0.140, p < 0.001); conditional effects further show that the value–intention link becomes non-significant at high levels of anticipated regret but becomes substantially stronger at low levels. The article contributes by offering a disaggregated account of feature effects, clarifying the mediating role of perceived value, and revealing a threshold-like moderating role of anticipated regret in a collectivist, socially dense digital marketplace. Managerially, the findings indicate that stronger host expertise, richer interaction, clearer visualization, and regret-reduction mechanisms are pivotal for improving conversion efficiency in Guangdong's live-streaming commerce market.