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Top1. Introduction
Emerging technology such as mobile apps are positively affecting the consumer behaviour and the retailer benefits in an unprecedented manner (Salz, 2014; Grewal, Roggeveen and Nordfält, (2017). There is an exponential growth of mobile apps in a retailing settings and this mobile apps diffusion is facilitating the interaction and easy reach of retailer and the consumer (Crnkovic, 2013; Magrath and McCormick, 2013; Taylor, and Levin, 2014; Rivera, Gregory and Cobos, 2015; Khalid, Shihab, Nagappan and Hassan, 2015; Hsu and Lin, 2016; Kuo, Ruan, Chan and Lei, 2017; Huang, Xu, Lin and Li, 2017; Linnhoff and Smith, 2017; Hur, Lee and Choo, 2017). Despite the huge leap of mobile apps, there are limited empirical studies that focus on the relationship between customer perception of performance expectation, trust, tension free and mobile apps usefulness. The major concern of the extant researchers are mobile app prediction for purchasing and information-sharing (Taylor and Levin, 2014), mobile apps crashes, functional errors and feature requests (Khalid et al., 2015), children cognitive experience of the mobile app and their parents mobile app communication responsiveness (Muzellec, Feenstra, de Faultrier, and Boulay, 2016), profiling of mobile app users (Liu, Zhao and Li, 2017), mobile app adoption in different life stages (Frey, Xu and Ilic, 2017), implications of mobile apps customer experience model on retailers (McLean, Al-Nabhani and Wilson, 2018) and mobile apps use in relation to consumer age and the type of device utilized (Natarajan, Balasubramanian, and Kasilingam, 2018).
Due to the research gaps as revealed in the previous research, this study combines the social cognition, utilitarian and gratification factors to explain the mobile app usefulness in a retailing context. Sjöblom, Törhönen, Hamari and Macey, (2017) emphasized the importance of gratification categories and posit that there is no association between information dissemination and tension release motivations but rather suggest distraction and escapism as the two facets of tension release. Escapism indicates freedom from daily worries through hedonic features of the retailing mobile app. Reychav and Wu, (2014) assert that tension-free needs can be met through hedonic features of multimedia on the retailing mobile app. On the other hand, Grewal, et al., (2017) supported the utilitarian factors of technology as a means of enablement for consumers to take right decisions on products or services to deplete. Okumus, Ali, Bilgihan and Ozturk, (2018), proposed five determinants of mobile app usage as performance expectancy, social influence, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions and personal innovativeness. This study corroborates the importance of performance expectancy and facilitating conditions variables as a predictor of retailing mobile app usefulness. Regarding the social cognition factor, Marriott and Williams, (2018) examined trust in technology and look closely at M-vendor, M-service, M-device and disposition to trust. M-device was insignificant in the study of Marriott and Williams, (2018) but M-vendor, M-service and disposition to trust are significant predictors of overall trust. Utilizing trust in retailing mobile app study is inevitable because distrust can hamper the effective use of the retailing mobile app.