Aligning Expert Priorities and Consumer-Perceived Performance in Korean Live Commerce: An Integrated AHP–IPA Analysis

Live commerce, which combines live streaming, real-time interaction, and immediate purchasing, has grown rapidly across East Asian markets. South Korea provides an appropriate context for examining whether platform attributes regarded as strategically important by industry experts align with those consumers perceive as effective. Drawing on IT affordance theory, Uses and Gratifications theory, and signaling theory, this study combines the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), conducted with academic and industry experts, and Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA), conducted with experienced Korean live-commerce consumers, to compare expert priorities with consumer evaluations across nine platform attributes representing benefit, affordance, and seller characteristic dimensions. The AHP results indicate that both expert groups consistently assign the greatest strategic importance to the platform’s visual and interactive affordances, particularly visibility and meta-voicing, despite some differences in their evaluations of secondary attributes. The IPA results show that consumers consider all nine attributes to be more important than their current level of performance, with the largest gaps observed for review trust and shopping guidance, two attributes closely associated with the credibility of platform-provided information. Comparing the two sets of findings reveals a clear gap in alignment. The attributes receiving the highest priority from experts are not those where consumers perceive the greatest performance deficiencies, while review trust emerges as a particularly urgent area for improvement that expert assessment alone does not fully capture. This study interprets these findings as evidence of a gap between expert priorities and consumer experience and discusses their implications for resource allocation and review verification in Korean live-commerce platforms rather than as indicators of corporate growth, structural risk, or sustainability outcomes. Because the analysis is based on cross-sectional, self-reported data collected from a single national market, the applicability of these findings to other contexts and to objective organizational performance should be examined in future research.