Perceived Trust, Ease of Use and Adoption of UPI-Based Payments among Street Vendors and Micro-Merchants in Urban Punjab: A TAM-Based Survey

Abstract

India's Unified Payments Interface processed over 131 billion transactions in FY 2023-24, making it the world's most widely used real-time payment system by volume. Yet the academic literature on UPI adoption has concentrated almost exclusively on salaried, educated, and smartphone-primary users — while the micro-merchant and street vendor segment, which constitutes a massive and economically vital share of India's informal commerce, remains essentially unstudied. This paper examines UPI adoption behaviour among street vendors and micro-merchants in Ludhiana, applying the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to a population whose adoption experience is shaped by very different constraints than those of middle-class digital payment users. Primary data were collected from 200 street vendors and micro-merchants operating in Ludhiana's key commercial streets — Chaura Bazar, Ghanta Ghar, and the Civil Lines market area — through a structured, interview-administered questionnaire measuring perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, trust, fraud anxiety, and social influence as predictors of UPI adoption intention and actual usage. Multiple regression analysis was employed. Perceived usefulness emerged as the strongest predictor of UPI adoption intention (β = 0.39), followed by trust (β = 0.33) and social influence from neighbouring vendors (β = 0.27). Perceived ease of use was significant (β = 0.21) but weaker than expected, reflecting the growing familiarity with QR-code payment interfaces even among low-literacy users. Fraud anxiety was a significant negative predictor (β = −0.29). The study contributes original TAM evidence from India's informal street economy and offers policy-relevant guidance for expanding digital payment adoption among micro-merchants.

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