Adoption of cashless payment systems in the bottom-of-the-pyramid retail supply chains in India: A technology-organization-environment framework perspective

We investigate the adoption of cashless payment systems by small retailers and their upstream suppliers (wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers) serving the bottom-of-the-pyramid customers in India. We use the Technology-Organization-Environment framework to hypothesize how relative advantage, perceived barriers, firm size, firm scope, and competition influence the adoption of cashless payment systems. We collected data from 392 small retailers and 269 upstream suppliers from urban, semi-urban, and rural India. The results indicate that perceived barriers, firm scope, firm size, and competition influence the adoption of cashless payment systems. Upon further investigation, we found that all five factors influence retailers’ adoption of cashless payment systems, but only firm scope and competition are significantly related to adoption for upstream suppliers. These results highlight that the factors influencing the adoption of cashless payment systems may also depend on supply chain position. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results. We also validate the findings from our quantitative analysis by presenting excerpts from interviews with the merchants.