Validating the role of digital payment mode as a new driver of online shopping: A modified UTAUT2 model

• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Author: Savita Gupta,Ravi Kiran,Rakesh K. Sharma
• Date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2434

ACADEMIC PAPER

Validating the role of digital payment mode as a new driver of

online shopping: A modified UTAUT2 model

Savita Gupta | Ravi Kiran | Rakesh K. Sharma

School of Humanities and Social Sciences,

Thapar Institute of Engineering and

Technology, Patiala, India

Correspondence

Savita Gupta, School of Humanities & Social

Sciences, Thapar Institute of Engineering and

Technology, Patiala-147004, Punjab, India.

Email: sgupta_phd16@thapar.edu

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of digital mode of payment

along with the initial drivers of UTAUT2. This has its relevance especially in view of

demonetization move by the Indian government. There are relatively few studies

analyzing the impact of the digital payment mode on behavioral intention in develop-

ing countries like India and thus, this research area is untapped and requires further

investigation. The data have been collected from 364 people through structured

questionnaire with the help of Snowball sampling technique. The Respondents are

online shopping consumers in Punjab, Himachal, and Haryana. The current study has

used UTUAT2 and the Digital Mode of Payment has been added as a new driver to

understand the changing consumer behavior in view of demonetization in India. It is

one of the initial studies extending UTAUT2 to include digital payment mode as an

additional driver of online shopping influencing behavioral intention.

1|INTRODUCTION

India ranks 77 out of 190 economies on the ease of doing business

index (Goel, 2018). India's leap of 23 points shows that India is now

focusing to tap the benefits of demographic dividend, with nearly

80 crore people below the age of 34 years. But in 2016, scenario has

been completely different. India ranked 130 out of 189 economies

and high on consumer perception index, according to the report by

the World Bank in ease of doing business. It is believed that societal

norms have become more acceptable towards black money

(Lahiri, 2016). The eradication of corruption is not a social necessity

but also has strong economic rationale.

Further, there were only five crore individuals who were filing tax

returns in the Indian economy and tax evasions are high. The statistics

do not match with the number of cars purchased and foreign visits

during 1 year (India Today, 2016). According to the World Bank, India

was having the 22.2% share of gross domestic product (GDP) in

shadow economy, while that of China is 12.7% and Japan had 11%

(Rajakumar & Shetty, 2016). It is against this backdrop that Indian gov-

ernment resorted to demonetization. Transparency was the need of

the hour. The prime focus of demonetization, which started with anti-

corruption eventually moved to a closely related issue of digitizing

India. Since then, in continuing the focus on corruption the govern-

ment has placed immense emphasis on digitizing India.

Now, the question that arises is whether India is ready to switch

from cash-driven economy to cashless economy. E-commerce is a big

business today and even getting bigger day by day. Online shopping

has been embraced by Indians with close to 25–30 million adults mak-

ing a purchase via the internet in the last year. The total retail sales in

India are likely to increase from the U.S.$717.73billion during 2014 to

touch U.S.$ 1.224.58billion in the near future (ASSOCHAM, 2019).

This change calls for a study to examine how drivers of online shop-

ping are related with behavioral intention (BI) in view of digital

payment mode.

A number of theoretical models like technology acceptance model

(TAM) (Davis, 1989), theory of planned behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991)

have been used intensely by numerous researchers to understand the

user acceptance behavior of online shoppers. Venkatesh et al. (2003)

gave a Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT).

This model focused on performance expectancy (PE), effort expec-

tancy (EE), social influence (SI), BI, facilitating conditions (FC), and user

behavior (UB). And then came the UTAUT2 in 2012 with the addi-

tional constructs of habit, hedonic motivation, and the price value.

In context of online shopping, the present research extends

UTAUT2, taking digital payment mode as a new construct. The

researchers are interested to examine whether consumers are

adopting this payment mode for online shopping and how it relates

with BI. The accomplishment of the digital India initiative depends

Received: 13 July 2020 Revised: 19 August 2020 Accepted: 25 August 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2434

J Public Affairs. 2022;22:e2434. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1of13

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2434