The Adoption of Mobile Payment on Today’s Society

The adoption of mobile payment on today’s society.

Introduction

   With how technologically advanced today’s society is consumers are beginning to change how they purchase goods and services, from the traditional credit card methods to the now new up and coming contactless payment methods one of this method being mobile payment. In today’s world the total estimate of active mobile subscription worldwide has passed seven billion (Humbani & Wiese, 2018) and in the United States of America 79% of mobile users are currently using mobile payment to purchase their products (de Kerviler, Demoulin, & Zidda, 2016). With how many active users there are merchants are beginning to adopt mobile payment into their businesses to take advantage of this new up and coming market trend (Kim, Mirusmonov, & Lee, 2010). 

How it works

   As stated before mobile payment is a form of contactless payment method where when a consumer wants to make a purchase, the transaction is made using a mobile device to pay and the consumer don’t have to interact with the shop’s physical point of sales system. This method relies on a secure mobile browser or application or short messaging service also known as SMS. Examples of these payments are buying things on the internet through a mobile device, transferring funds through mobile applications and even downloading subscription based news articles (Pooi, Khalid, & Nadarajah, 2018).

   Proximity mobile payment is also another form of contactless mobile payment where the consumer is now present at the merchant’s point of sales system and uses their mobile device to pay. This method requires an interface for the consumer to interact their mobile device with the merchants unattended point of sales service examples of this are ticketing vending machines and Qr codes (de Kerviler et al., 2016). Near Field Communication (NFC) or Bluetooth low energy proximity sensing technology (iBeacon) are also popular forms of this payment method where the consumer uses an NFC enabled mobile devices installed with a payment application with the user’s payment details such as credit or debit card in the app and the user will then tap it with the merchant’s payment terminal making the whole transaction easier and more convenient. Examples of these methods are Apple pay and Samsung pay (de Kerviler et al., 2016).

Obstacles

   Although there are all these forms of mobile payments available to every consumer only 15% out of the 79% mobile consumers in America uses mobile payment regularly (de Kerviler et al., 2016). According to a research done by (de Kerviler et al., 2016), in the article it states that there are two factors which heavily contributes towards the percentage stated above perceived benefits and perceived risks. Perceived benefits are benefits which makes it more convenient for users to collect product information as well the purchasing process for example mobile delivery service, mobile information gathering, mobile coupons and so on. Another study done by (Pooi et al., 2018) suggests that in order to increases the number of mobile payment user’s shops and businesses need to focus on increasing these benefits which are mainly perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and social influence.

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According to the diagram from …….. perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are the key factors in determining the use of mobile payment.

   Perceived usefulness is defined as the extent to which a person believes that the use of mobile payment will improve his or her performance in daily activities as stated by (Pooi et al., 2018) in his article. Whereas perceived ease of use can be defined as the extent to which a person believes that using the system would be free of mental and physical effort (Pooi et al., 2018). Users may be discouraged to use a mobile payment system if the system itself is highly confusing and complex. So, the systems itself must be as user friendly as possible without sacrificing to much usability. The lack of perceived ease of use is mostly related to user’s lack knowledge of how impactful or advantages mobile payment services are to them. The users lack of accepting new technological innovation is also another factor, but this is not a problem in the future as newer generation are being brought up alongside more and more advance technology and having it being a more integral part of their daily lives (Pooi et al., 2018). Following this is social influence. According to (Pooi et al., 2018) they suggests that influence from friends, family and even media heavily dictates user’s intention of using mobile commerce in return affecting mobile payment usage. When businesses plan on incorporating mobile payment services into their company, social influence should not be ignored and taken into consideration when develop the system.