Understanding the Customer Intention to Adopt Food Delivery Applications

Food delivery applications are quickly growing, and in many countries, they have become popular and successful. Nevertheless, particularly in the developed and emerging markets, this sector is still in the early stages of growth. The purpose of this research is to understand the intention of consumers to adopt food delivery applications in Malaysia. In addition, this study aims to explore the customers' experience in using food delivery applications based on diffusion of innovation model, which consist of five characteristics: Relative advantage (RA), Compatibility (CM), Observability (OB), Complexity (CX) and Trialability (TR), were used to assess consumer 's intention in food delivery apps. A total of 218 valid samples had obtained from Malaysian consumers. This study shows a positive influence on the intention, and five attribute perception used to determine the intention to use food delivery applications (apps). These results together have a critical managerial impact on core players, for example, food delivery companies or restaurants. One of the main implications is that food delivery companies must make efforts to make their applications easy to access, smooth and enjoyable to use. Keyword: food delivery applications; Diffusion of innovation; Relative advantage; Compatibility; Trialability; Intention to use; Adoption. INTRODUCTION In revolutionizing food delivery systems, technology played a crucial role. It helped transform customers' behaviors as it was motivated by their technological reliance to do anything online that involved cooked meals delivered. Convenience is the biggest driver for consumers because ordering is easy as only a few taps on every mobile device. The demand for food production in South-East Asia is massive. While the food industry is a business that is worth a trillion dollars, distribution is just a small fraction (Lau & ng, 2019). This demand was an excellent chance for future growth. An expected USD 956 million in annual sales, one of the fastest-growing food-market markets, will be produced in the food delivery industry by 2020. Most Malaysian consumers use their mobile devices to shop online. Through their cell phones in 2016, 17.9 million Malaysians were on the Internet. Through 2020, this predicted to reach through 21.1 million internet subscribers (Zhang et al., 2017). Besides, Malaysian food and beverage companies are delivering a continuing new surge of food delivery services (OFD). Online food ordering is not limited to taking and eating out. Many restaurants in Malaysia offer online food delivery services. There are numerous food delivery companies. FoodPanda, the first active company established in Malaysia, is among the firms that offer food delivery services. Other companies on the market are Deliver Eat, Uber Eats, Honest bee, Running Man Delivery and FoodTime and Dahmakan, and major regions like Kuala Lumpur, Klang Valley and Johor Bahru clustered in most of the food delivery services. Furthermore, the additional ease of access to OFD services via their smartphones could encourage consumers, with one single click, Switch to online food delivery (OFD) services from conventional buying of online products. Several types of research were held out on mobile applications in the dining sector on the accessibility of research on the use of mobile technology in food delivery. As the Malaysian society is known for dining in restaurants for a meeting, events, to understand in which variables that consumer' behaviour adopts food delivery application, this means the Malaysian society is turning into ordering food by the applications to their place, and how is it changed within the Malaysian society to not dining in the restaurants. This research seeks to study the adoption of food delivery applications by customers in Malaysia. This study will respond to the issue of the research: "What variables influence the desire of customers to use food delivery applications? “Why Individuals adopt food delivery apps instead of C p rig t@ FT SM