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App Adoption: The Effect on Purchasing of Customers Who Have Used a Mobile Website Previously

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  • Liu, Huan
  • Lobschat, Lara
  • Verhoef, Peter C.
  • Zhao, Hong

Abstract

A key question for retailers who already offer a mobile website is, whether they should add an app as an additional purchase channel. We address this issue by exploring whether consumers' app adoption stimulates additional purchases and how this change in purchase behavior differs across customers with different levels of spending share for different product categories and customer loyalty. By using transactional data from a Chinese online retailer, we show that app adopters have higher purchase incidence, buy more frequently, and spend more in each order than non-adopters. We also find that app adoption has a stronger positive effect on the order size of customers who have a lower spending share of high-price products and customers who are less loyal to the focal retailer. Hereby, we contribute to multichannel and mobile marketing literature by empirically examining the effects of adding a similar (mobile) purchase channel to an already established (mobile) purchase channel. Managerially, our results suggest that apps are worth investing in despite their similarity to mobile websites and can induce non-loyal customers to purchase more and thus potentially foster these customers' loyalty.

Suggested Citation

  • Liu, Huan & Lobschat, Lara & Verhoef, Peter C. & Zhao, Hong, 2019. "App Adoption: The Effect on Purchasing of Customers Who Have Used a Mobile Website Previously," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 16-34.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:joinma:v:47:y:2019:i:c:p:16-34
    DOI: 10.1016/j.intmar.2018.12.001
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    Cited by:

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    2. van Heerde, Harald J. & Dinner, Isaac M. & Neslin, Scott A., 2019. "Engaging the unengaged customer: The value of a retailer mobile app," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 420-438.
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    7. Aydin Gokgoz, Zeynep & Ataman, M. Berk & van Bruggen, Gerrit H., 2021. "There’s an app for that! understanding the drivers of mobile application downloads," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 423-437.
    8. Molinillo, Sebastian & Aguilar-Illescas, Rocío & Anaya-Sánchez, Rafael & Carvajal-Trujillo, Elena, 2022. "The customer retail app experience: Implications for customer loyalty," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    9. Haoyu Liu & Shulin Liu, 2020. "Research on Advertising and Quality of Paid Apps, Considering the Effects of Reference Price and Goodwill," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(5), pages 1-23, May.
    10. Liu, Huan & Sese, F. Javier, 2022. "The Impact of Mobile App Adoption on Cross-buying: The Moderating Roles of Product Category Characteristics and Adoption Timing," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 98(2), pages 241-259.
    11. Bies, Suzanne M.T.A. & Bronnenberg, Bart J. & Gijsbrechts, Els, 2021. "How push messaging impacts consumer spending and reward redemption in store-loyalty programs," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 877-899.
    12. Chen, Jialie & Rao, Vithala R., 2023. "Evaluating strategies for promoting retail mobile channel using a hidden Markov model," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 99(1), pages 66-84.
    13. Kamrul Islam Syed & Prof. Abu Bakr Sade & Prof. Huam Hon Tat, 2024. "Social Influence, Self-Efficacy, Trust, and Corporate Digital Responsibility in Adoption of E-Marketing," International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), vol. 8(3), pages 1052-1061, March.
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