Abstract:

Market, technological and legal developments have contributed to a surge of innovation and change in payment systems in recent years, including the development of new means of making payments and the alteration of existing ones. However, many of the recent offerings have failed to gain traction in the e-Commerce marketplace for a variety of reasons. To understand the reasons for this it is necessary to identify the characteristics and services of payment systems in general, and then to determine the role they play in facilitating the more widespread adoption and diffusion of Internet payment systems in particular. This study examines both practitioner and academic literature related to payment systems, firstly, to develop a comprehensive list of their technical and systemic features, and then, using experts in the field, to categorize and consolidate them within a set of salient attributes. These attributes will then be used to study online merchants and customers and their perceptions of, and preferences towards, different Internet payment instruments.