We investigate the adoption of cashless payment systems by small retailers and their upstream suppliers (wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers) serving the bottom-of-the-pyramid customers in India. We use the Technology-Organization-Environment framework to hypothesize how relative advantage, perceived barriers, firm size, firm scope, and competition influence the adoption of cashless payment systems. We collected data from 392 small retailers and 269 upstream suppliers from urban, semi-urban, and rural India. The results indicate that perceived barriers, firm scope, firm size, and competition influence the adoption of cashless payment systems. Upon further investigation, we found that all five factors influence retailers’ adoption of cashless payment systems, but only firm scope and competition are significantly related to adoption for upstream suppliers. These results highlight that the factors influencing the adoption of cashless payment systems may also depend on supply chain position. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results. We also validate the findings from our quantitative analysis by presenting excerpts from interviews with the merchants.

我们调查了为印度金字塔底层客户提供服务的小型零售商及其上游供应商（批发商、分销商和制造商）采用无现金支付系统的情况。我们使用技术-组织-环境框架来假设相对优势、感知障碍、公司规模、公司范围和竞争如何影响无现金支付系统的采用。我们收集了来自印度城市、城乡结合部和农村地区 392 家小型零售商和 269 家上游供应商的数据。结果表明，感知障碍、公司范围、公司规模和竞争都会影响无现金支付系统的采用。经过进一步调查，我们发现所有五个因素都会影响零售商采用无现金支付系统，但只有公司范围和竞争与上游供应商的采用显着相关。这些结果表明，影响无现金支付系统采用的因素也可能取决于供应链的地位。我们讨论这些结果的理论和实践意义。我们还通过提供对商家的采访摘录来验证定量分析的结果。