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Live chat tools have emerged as a channel for fostering synchronous communication between sellers and buyers. The role of live chat in the e-commerce environment, however, is largely underexplored. Using granular data from Alibaba, we examine the effect of live chat on consumers’ purchase decisions. After controlling for the selection process that customers with high purchase intention are more likely to initiate live chat in the first place, we find that live chat can increase purchase probability of tablets by 15.99%. We also investigate how the effect of live chat is moderated by existing information cues: product sales volume and seller feedback score. The substitutional or complementary patterns allow us to understand how live chat tools change the ways consumers evaluate product quality and seller credibility. We observe a substitutional effect of live chat on seller feedback score such that sellers with low …