Apps-Commerce in Emerging Markets: Insights and Future Business Models

Introduction

Managers are using consumer decision-making models in order to predict as well as to explain the consumer behaviors, that can act as a basis to make decisions in marketing (Butler & Peppard, 1998). Using the Internet and World Wide Websites (WWW) as communication and promotional tools to perform distribution functions, enabled the marketers to start finding an entirely new world of consumer purchasing behavior opportunities (Khan, 2010). Online shopping along with electronic retailing over the Internet came into existence back in 1994 (Chai Har et al., 2011; Varadarajan et al., 2010) and a revolution has been building up on marketing principals for many years. This standpoint made some dramatic alterations to the conventional ways of viewing the communication media together with advertising. The Internet and Apps related technologies are considered as information ‘‘super highway” since they are able to connect people, computers, and data to one another. Because of them, a new communication medium has risen, which provides an access to the large flow of information across various broad extensions (Akman & Mishra, 2010). The Internet, which is a gigantic universal network, is a revolution consisting of packet-switched computer net-works that are interconnected. The Internet can be named as a trendy marketing medium with the potential to make radical transformations to the ways corporations conduct their businesses and respond to their customers (Hoffman, 1996). During the past decade, the Internet has fundamentally transformed how retailers are competing in the marketplace. According to recent reports by Akman & Mishra (2010), the number of Internet users has reached to 1412 million worldwide. In Asia, as a continent, the rapid growth of the economy has resulted in a higher Internet penetration in the past few years (Muhammad Najib et al., 2010). As an instance, A National Computer Board survey, which was conducted among 1500 citizens of Singapore, has shown that 2% of Singaporeans who are more than 18-year-old adults, actually purchased some items online and all of them were very satisfied with their purchases (Sim & Koi, 2002). From an economic perspective, many countries in Asia are well defined as emerging markets, which explain the improvement of IT infrastructure and development. In this study, Malaysia, as one of the emerging markets, will be the focus of the research.