Understanding the Consumer Purchase in the Digital Goods Market

Recent digital convergent market emerging with the advent of smart phone leads a new online intermediary market for the transaction of application programs adopted on the convergent device. When purchasing digital products on the application market, consumers tend to consider various factors to reduce uncertainties on the products similar to the way of buying brick-and-click products. Motivation of this study stems from the understanding that characteristics shown on the application market are linked to the relationship between the purchase of applications and the other factors such as a ubiquity by a device and non-extraneous features of digital goods. We collected transaction data sold on Korea on the Apple’s app store in indirect way from an aggregated service site containing rank, purchases, reviews, rating and so on for more than three months and over 2,300 applications purchased by Korean consumers.