Understanding the Digital Home-Service User: A Conceptual Model for Ludhiana's Consumers.

The rapid growth of digital home-service platforms has transformed how urban consumers access essential services such as cleaning, repairs, beauty, and maintenance. This paper develops a conceptual model to understand the digital home-service user in Ludhiana, a fast-growing urban and industrial city in India. Drawing from consumer behaviour, technology acceptance, and service marketing literature, the model integrates key determinants including perceived usefulness, ease of use, trust, service quality, pricing transparency, digital literacy, and socio-demographic characteristics. The framework also incorporates contextual factors such as urban lifestyle pressures, platform reliability, and local service availability, which shape adoption and continued usage intentions. By focusing on Ludhiana’s consumers, the study captures the dynamics of digital service consumption in tier-II Indian cities, where traditional service arrangements coexist with platform-based models. The proposed conceptual model offers a structured foundation for future empirical research and provides insights for digital home-service platforms, policymakers, and service providers to design user-centric strategies, improve adoption, and enhance service delivery in similar urban contexts.