The acceptance of mobile payments in the German retail market

The acceptance of mobile payments is one of the research challenges of high strategic relevance in retailing. Most of the previous studies of mobile payment field focus on consumers’ opinions, expectations and concerns to assess their acceptance of mobile payment systems. The financial transactions’ complementing party – the merchants – who also needed to accept and, therefore, to implement mobile payment technologies is considered in this study. The purpose of this study is to enhance an existing research framework, which already integrates the constructs user satisfaction and technology acceptance, to fit better the mobile payment domain out of the retailer’s perspective. Seizing this, we develop and test a new structural equation model linking between the quality of the environment, economic benefits and application satisfaction with the merchant’s use of mobile payment systems. Testing the conceptual framework by fitting a structural equation model builds upon information obtained from 166 merchants spreading all over Germany. We collected the information from the German retail sector, which is indeed one of the most competitive and innovative in Europe, using a quantitative questionnaire. Our findings have a significant impact on retailers’ application satisfaction and their system satisfaction of mobile payment technologies. Complementing the results provide evidence that both satisfaction components have a statistically significant and substantial impact on the merchant’s behavioral intention to adopt mobile payment technologies. Summarizing, this study identifies antecedents, drivers and barriers of actual mobile payment system use. All of our results are in line with today’s state of the art technology acceptance literature but additionally highlight retailers’ intention to use mobile payments. We conclude that German merchants still have difficulties in assessing the economic benefits of adopting mobile payment applications in general, but on the other hand, see significant benefits when comparing mobile payment systems to other payment methods.