Social Aware Mobile Payment Service Popularity Analysis: The Case of WeChat Payment in China

Since its release in 2013, WeChat payment service has gradually become one of the most popular mobile payment services in China. Different from other mobile payment platforms, WeChat payment bundles with the most popular social network service in China, WeChat. It is then becoming interesting to investigate the reason beneath its popularity by combination of social network and mobile payment. In this research, we applied the technology acceptance model to predict the acceptability of WeChat payment and to identify the variables which attribute to the popularity of WeChat payment. Besides the primary explanatory variables of TAM, the proposed framework is further extended to include the constructs of Social Interaction, Trust, Perceived Enjoyment and Use Context. Online survey has been collected by respondents chosen randomly among users of WeChat payment. The results have shown that the proposed model is able to explain the variance in user's behaviour intention to use WeChat payment services. We hope this study can provide insights to understand the adoption behaviour of social aware mobile payment and service and help further improve their services.