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Top1. Introduction
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have rapidly changed the way consumers shop online and provided a better shopping experience in electronic commerce, leading to a substantial rate of change in consumer behavior and interaction with retailers through the establishment of mobile channels. This has brought about the emergence of mobile commerce, also known as m-commerce as “an extension of e-commerce where business activities are performed in a wireless environment using mobile devices” (Zhang et al., 2012). In 2017, global m-commerce sales reached 58.9% of total e-commerce spending. By 2021, m-commerce will be estimated to account for 72.9% of the e-commerce market (eMarketer, 2018), and be viewed as the latest trend and best complementary to consumer purchase processing online (Marriott et al., 2017). Many successful online companies have created mobile apps and mobile-compatible websites to accommodate for this expanding market, such as Amazon, Shopee, Lazada, and have developed effective business strategies and marketing techniques as a result. Professionals and business managers emphasized the importance of explicating consumer behavior for the successful management in the recent development of m-commerce (Hung et al., 2012). Consumer adoption of mobile shopping apps is an emerging area in m-commerce which presents interesting challenges and opportunities for both retailers and app developers (Chopdar et al., 2018). Despite the growing prevalence of mobile shopping, insufficient research has been conducted to determine how mobile users process their behavioral intentions of shopping online through mobile apps.
It was found that Technology Acceptance Model and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology were the dominant theories used by researchers in understanding user intentions in mobile shopping context (Chhonker, 2018). On the other hand, the ELM uses a dual route process to describe how attitude is formed and reinforced by persuasive arguments. In other words, it was used to provide a framework to help explain how individuals process information and the effective outcomes of persuasive communications. ELM has been extensively researched and reported in many fields such as social psychology (Chaiken and Maheswaran, 1994; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), marketing (MacInnis et al., 2002), information technology (Bhattacherjee & Sanford, 2006; Sussman & Siegal, 2003), and e-commerce (Cheung et al., 2008). Furthermore, the findings of research by Mak et al. (1997) explicated that the dual route of information processing is valid in the context of persuasion by experts, yet the same results of ELM in the context of mobile shopping are undetermined. Nevertheless, the theoretical principals of ELM and the findings of previous studies have shown that in the context of mobile shopping, information quality and source credibility play an important role in influencing the adoption of information system as consumers often pay attention to the information of product/service when shopping online. Hence, further research can apply the ELM as theoretical foundation into investigating the effective persuasive processes involved in the mobile shopping context.