Understanding Cart Abandonment in Social Commerce: The Role of Hesitation to Checkout and Streamer Performance

Indonesian TikTok Shop users exhibit an abandonment rate of 84.8%, despite their high engagement, indicating that cart abandonment is a critical conversion barrier in live-streaming social commerce. With Indonesia's social commerce market anticipated to attain USD 22 billion by 2028, it is imperative to comprehend the factors contributing to incomplete purchases. Previous studies have neglected the relationship between cognitive overload, indecision, and streamer engagement. This study seeks to investigate the impact of choice overload on cart abandonment via consumer indecision and to evaluate the moderating effect of streamer performance on these dynamics. This study utilized a quantitative explanatory methodology through a survey technique. The demographic comprised Generation Z and Generation Y consumers engaging in TikTok Shop live-streaming commerce in Indonesia. A total of 215 respondents were chosen via purposive sampling. Data were gathered through an online questionnaire and analyzed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings demonstrate that choice overload favorably affects hesitancy, hence considerably elevating cart abandonment rates. Hesitation to checkout completely mediates the connection between choice overload and cart abandonment, whereas streamer performance moderates the influence of both on cart abandonment. These findings enhance S-O-R theory by identifying hesitation to checkout as a complete mediator and streamer performance as a contextual moderator, offering practical implications for platforms and sellers to mitigate desertion through assortment simplification and streamer enhancement.