Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Service Quality of the Smartphone App Store on Users' Repurchase Intention

Recent trends of mobile convergence has already brought about many changes in our digitally-powered society. Especially, taking advantage of strengths of existing mobile devices and smart phones have already been established as a primary standard in the business intelligence world. Such high-powered digital devices equipped with mobile convergence functions are getting more momentum as app stores are prevailing. Basically, the app stores are administered by smart phone manufacturers, creating a new business ecosystem among app developers and end-users. However, there are paucity of studies tackling an issue about how users` repurchase intention of the apps is influenced by the service qualities of the app stores. In this respect, this study aims to investigate the effect of app store service quality on users` satisfaction and repurchase intention. As the value of loyal customers is incomparably high in app commerce, winning customers` loyalty is vital to the success of app stores. In this study, a customer is defined as one who has purchased goods or services at least once from the app stores. The proposed research model includes a number of constructs such as app perceptions, customer service, perceived ease of use, design, promotion, perceived consumer risk and connectivity. Empirical results revealed that perceived consumer risk has a negative relationship with consumer`s perceived repurchase intention. All the other variables-app perceptions, customer service, perceived ease of use, design, promotion, connectivity- are found to be positively related with the repurchase intentions.