Adoption of an online sales channel and “appification” in the enterprise application software market: a qualitative study

Pioneered by Apple’s App Store, online sales channels for software applications have acquired a prominent role in the consumer software market. This success has been a catalyst for several vendors of enterprise application software, who opened their own online sales channel alongside traditional ones based on the deployment of intermediaries and sales teams. However, it is disputable whether the online purchase of a software application is as compelling for an organization as it is for an individual consumer, and whether drivers and barriers of channel adoption are the same in these different contexts. Therefore, relying on a qualitative research strategy, we explored the channel adoption decision made by organizational software buyers to uncover and categorize relevant influencing factors. In particular, solution attributes such as specificity, price, implementation/integration effort, scope, and evaluability appear to play a key role alongside contractual aspects and the existence of an established relationship with the vendor. We also investigated factors’ interdependences to sketch an online channel adoption model which, on the one hand, may allow practitioners in the enterprise software market to diagnose channel adoption issues and, on the other, may serve as foundation for further multidisciplinary research in this topical area of study.