<p>Recently, the growing popularity of live e-commerce sales on platforms has significantly amplified streamers’ popularity and bargaining power, which influences merchants’ online sales model selection. This study constructs a game-theoretic model to explore the optimal choice between traditional and live e-commerce sales models for merchants, as well as their pricing strategies, while incorporating the impact of streamer’s bargaining power. Our findings reveal that, when the platform’s commission rate is moderate and consumers’ initial product information is limited, merchants set higher product prices in the live e-commerce sales model compared to the traditional e-commerce sales model. And strong bargaining power of the streamer enables it to charge a high pit fee, resulting in high product prices. Furthermore, the merchant could benefit from choosing the live e-commerce sales model in the strong market expansion effect and small streamer’s effort cost coefficient setting. And adopting the live e-commerce sales model consistently benefits the streamer, platform, and merchant only when the market expansion effect is strong or the commission rate is low. Specifically, moderate streamer’s bargaining power increases the likelihood of such a mutually beneficial outcome. Finally, a strong market expansion effect or streamer’s bargaining power enhances consumer surplus. However, excessive bargaining power allows the streamer to transfer its significantly increased live streaming cost to the merchant by charging high pit fees, ultimately reducing the merchant’s profit and diminishing social welfare.</p>