Determinants of Continuance Intention to Use Mobile Payments in China

Mobile payments as a critical service supporting mobile businesses have received significant attention from enterprises. The rapid spread of COVID-19 resulted in the closure of many restaurants, shopping malls, and supermarkets. Meanwhile, mobile payments directly replace cash payment (Yin, Gong, and Pan 2019) and change people’s consumption habits (Yin et al. 2019). Thus, it played an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic period when isolation measures were encouraged. With the booming mobile payments, the Chinese market has cultivated two giants and other mobile payments providers. In the competitive market environment, how to understand users’ requirements, enhance users’ product experience and enhance users’ stickiness is the key for enterprises to gain competitive advantages. The commercial value of mobile payments depends on the participation of more users and more using. Retaining existing mobile payment users would be subject to more attention from academic researchers and practitioners in this field. This research aims to apply the value-based adoption model (VAM), expectation-confirmation theory (ECM), and habit theory to investigate the factors affecting the usage continuance of mobile payments in China. A mixed-method approach, which combined qualitative and quantitative research, is selected for this study. Qualitative research employed the critical incident technique (CIT) method in exploratory analysis to explore the dimensions and connotations of the perceived value of mobile payments. From the perspective of user-perceived benefits, it contains five dimensions: utilitarian value, hedonic value, social value, ecological value and health value. From the perspective of user-perceived sacrifices, it includes three dimensions: risk cost, based on mobile and low-level pain of payment. Quantitative research employed structural equation modelling (SEM) to identify the factors affecting the mobile payments continuance use in China under different constructs, both habit-related factors and product-related factors (i.e., utilitarian, hedonic, social and health). Results showed that the significant factors directly affecting the intention to continue to use mobile payment services are habit and perceived utilitarian value. The findings also show that perceived hedonic value, perceived social value, and perceived health value all boost consumers’ desire to continue using mobile payments indirectly via the mediation of customers’ habits. These findings provide a direction for companies and developers of mobile payment services to encourage users’ continuance intention. The theoretical, methodological and practical contributions of this study, the generalisation aspects and limitation of this study, and the contexts of future research are discussed