The topic will illustrate the digital currency and its effects on consumer behavior in Saudi Arabia. A digital wallet is any program, electronic gadget, or internet service that enables people or organizations to conduct transactions electronically. Along with other things like gift cards and driver’s licenses, it keeps users’ payment data for various payment methods on numerous websites. It involves possessing money in payment done via digital methods. The payer and the payee send and receive money using digital payment methods. Another name for it is electronic payment. The official banking system is still inaccessible to more than 1.7 billion individuals worldwide. This makes it very challenging for elderly and disadvantaged individuals to invest in the future, take care of their family’s health and education needs, or save money for retirement (Alalwan et al., 2017). The cruel truth is that for many impoverished people worldwide, using banknotes in the informal economy is the only option to send or receive payments, which creates a barrier to utilizing official financial services. Additionally, cash transactions are generally risky, costly, inefficient, and inconvenient.
Saudi Arabia is a fast-growing country due to its large oil production bases and banking on beautiful sceneries that attract tourists from all over the world. In Saudi Arabia, the digital wallet system is considered cheap, fast, accurate, and secure (de Luna et al., 2019). With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the research topic was chosen because of the current phenomenon around financial technology use, particularly concerning digital payments (Aji et al., 2020). Financial technology is a brand-new technical advancement that has surfaced recently, combining financial technologies and services that have altered community behavior (Abdullah et al., 2020). Transactions once performed in-person and carried just a small amount of cash is now handled swiftly and are not constrained by location.
Research Questions
Do consumers’ purchasing decisions become influenced by using digital wallets as a form of payment?
It has been discovered that cashless payment affects customers’ propensity for spontaneous purchases. Unplanned purchases or decisions made on the spot are also considered impulsive purchases. The usage of credit cards and other contactless payment methods, such as cash, has been found to enable both direct and impulsive purchases by consumers. A recent study by Cocosila & Trabelsi (2016) and Ismail (2021) discovered that digital wallets influence Arabian customers’ spontaneous buying behavior. Similarly, impulsive online shopping is encouraged through E-wallet, one of Saudi Arabia’s rapidly expanding cashless payment systems. In light of those mentioned earlier, this research topic seeks to answer the question. It looks at how consumers utilize their digital wallets and further explores whether the proliferation of mobile payment systems would result in impulse buys.
What factors affect a consumer’s intention to use mobile wallets?
According to a review of the digital payment literature, most studies are concentrated on the variables that affect consumers’ intentions to continue using mobile payments, such as pre-adoption and post-adoption continuance intentions, security, factors that contribute to trust, and user satisfaction (Gupta et al., 2020). However, there has not been much attention paid to researching what influences consumers’ decisions to utilize digital wallet services, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak (Daragmeh et al., 2021). The relationship between a few specific factors, such as perceived behavioral control, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, subjective norm, perceived value, disconfirmation, and satisfaction, and the consumer’s continued intention to use a digital wallet is still not supported by empirical research.
What are the implications of a cashless society?
With Saudi Arabia growing economically, using digital wallets will mandate it to change the course of its technology. According to Bagla & Sancheti (2018), migrations to a cashless society consider various factors, from the simple financial to the purely social. Consequently, the advantages, disadvantages, and strategies for such a transition will depend on each country’s particular technical, financial, and social circumstances (Chen et al., 2019). The chosen topic will consider the country’s operation and identify if it sits well to adopt the method of digital wallet as its system of operation.
References
Abdullah, N., Redzuan, F., & Daud, N. A. (2020). E-wallet: Factors influencing user acceptance towards a cashless society in Malaysia among public universities. Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 20(1), 67-74. Web.
Aji, H. M., Berakon, I., & Md Husin, M. (2020). COVID-19 and e-wallet usage intention: A multigroup analysis between Indonesia and Malaysia. Cogent Business & Management, 7(1), 1804181. Web.
Alalwan, A. A., Dwivedi, Y. K., & Rana, N. P. (2017). Factors influencing adoption of mobile banking by Jordanian bank customers: Extending UTAUT2 with trust. International Journal of Information Management, 37(3), 99-110. Web.
Bagla, R. K., & Sancheti, V. (2018). Gaps in customer satisfaction with digital wallets: challenge for sustainability. Journal of Management Development. 37(6), 442-451. Web.
Chen, S. C., Chung, K. C., & Tsai, M. Y. (2019). How to achieve sustainable development of mobile payment through customer satisfaction—the SOR model. Sustainability, 11(22), 6314. Web.
Cocosila, M., & Trabelsi, H. (2016). An integrated value-risk investigation of contactless mobile payments adoption. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 20, 159-170. Web.
Daragmeh, A., Sági, J., & Zéman, Z. (2021). Continuous intention to use e-wallet in the context of the covid-19 pandemic: Integrating the health belief model (hbm) and technology continuous theory (tct). Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 7(2), 132. Web.
de Luna, I. R., Liébana-Cabanillas, F., Sánchez-Fernández, J., & Muñoz-Leiva, F. (2019). Mobile payment is not all the same: The adoption of mobile payment systems depending on the technology applied. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 146, 931-944. Web.
Gupta, A., Yousaf, A., & Mishra, A. (2020). How pre-adoption expectancies shape post-adoption continuance intentions: An extended expectation-confirmation model. International Journal of Information Management, 52, 102094. Web.
Ismail, I. (2021), “E-wallet use in Malaysia growing. New straits times. Web.