Times Have Changed, Don't Lose Business Because of “Sorry We Don't Accept Cards!”

Abstract

Over the past decade, many mobile payment systems have been introduced to facilitate the ease with which businesses and customers' process payments. For these mobile payment systems to succeed, merchant acceptance is of utmost importance as merchants play a central in the mobile payment value chain. As such, the main purpose of this chapter is to assess the determinants of merchant acceptance of mobile card payment systems using the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework. The study made use of structural equation modeling to evaluate the hypothesized association in the proposed model. Using data from 259 small businesses in the South African retail sector, this study found that two technological (i.e., relative advantage and perceived cost), one organizational (i.e., top management support), and two environmental (i.e., competitive pressure and customer pressure) context factors were significant determinants of merchant acceptance of mobile card payment systems. The chapter culminates with a discussion of the implications of the findings.