Background of Research
The Internet is a powerful platform for Apps regarding distribution of goods and services (Mohseni et al., 2016). Reports from Digital Marketing Ramblings stated that there were 600 million WhatsApp users in August 2014 since its start-up in 2009 (Aharony, 2015). In 2012, annual worldwide downloads from mobile App store grasped $64 billion and generated $18 billion revenue (Peng, Chen and Wen, 2014). By 2017, the revenue of mobile App stores is forecasted to reach $268.7 billion (Peng, Chen and Wen, 2014). Mobile banking tends to be the most promising App of mobile commerce in terms of outstanding flexibility and mobility in completing financial transaction (Tran and Corner, 2016). In addition, App for mobile-assisted language learning has transformed largely and have become increasingly popular due to the availability of free App for language learning (Böhm and Constantine, 2016).
According to a study conducted by Carter and Yeo (2016) in Malaysia, undergraduates aged between 18-24 use Apps mainly for social networking, videos, photos and texting, while postgraduates aged between 35-54 use Apps for emails, news, information and maps. Effective Measure and the Malaysian Digital Association states that Facebook Apps is ranked among the top Applications used in the country. Approximately 90% of Malaysians use Facebook as their primary choice of social media network (Mustaffa et al., 2011). Malaysians Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) reported that 34.6% of Malaysians download 10 to 20 App, 16.3% download 20 to 30 App, 7.4% download 30 to 40 App, 4.2% download 40 to 50 App and 1.5% download 50 to 60 (Rezaei and Amin, 2013). Furthermore, it is evidently proven that 21.2% of Malaysian use mobile App on a daily basis and 14.9% on a weekly basis.
One of the most important elements of any value chain is marketing channels due to a nation’s manufacturing outflow passes through them in bulk (Krafft et al., 2015). The past fifty years have shown that the scope of research regarding international marketing channels has drastically evolved (Hoppner and Griffith, 2015). A study by Anderl, Schumann and Kunz (2016) provides the retailers with a taxonomy-based approach to aid retailers to engage in relatively better understanding in usage of channels. A wide variety of dominant channel format is a unique characteristic of emerging economies (Venkatesan et al., 2015). The dominance of the Internet imposes an empathetic of e-service quality and by adopting means-ends-chain theory (Amin et al., 2015; Rezaei, 2015; Rezaei and Ghodsi, 2014), thus, a conceptual framework can be generated to understand the numerous models and related measures that have been industrialized to observe this construct (Blut et al., 2015). According to a multi-wave field study, suppliers tend to invest heavily in channel partner programs that motivate learning and selling from gratitude and indebtedness that help in transforming such investments into profitable returns (Pelser et al., 2015).