Merchant adoption of mobile payment: pre, during and post COVID-19 analysis using text mining

Purpose The research paper examines the adoption of mobile payment apps by merchants and analyses how Covid-19 affected the mobile payment adoption by merchants. Design/methodology/approach This study analysed 214,498 google play store reviews of seven merchant apps using sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling technique. Findings Sentiment analysis results reveal that most of the merchants have given positive reviews in pre, during and post Covid-19 time periods but the percentage of positive reviews decreased after Covid-19 which signifies that willingness of merchants towards merchant apps reduced after long term usage under constrained conditions. This study highlighted several important issues using LDA such as bank helpfulness, account payment timing, sign in or login error, service experience, offer and cashback and useful for business. Practical implications Concerned banks and app developers should update their apps as per the requirement of the merchants so that they can willingly accept payment through these apps. The identified issues should be resolved in their updated version of the apps. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature on technology adoption through a study analysing customer reviews of merchant apps. It is a study that conceptualised an understanding of merchant apps usage for mobile payments before, during and after Covid-19.