Over recent years, interest has been growing in Bitcoin, an innovation that has the potential to play an important role in e-commerce and beyond. The aim of our paper is to provide a comprehensive empirical study of the payment and investment features of Bitcoin, and their implications for the conduct of e-commerce. Since network externality theory suggests that the value of a network and its take-up are interlinked, we investigate both adoption and price formation. We discover that its returns are driven primarily by Bitcoin’s popularity, the sentiment expressed in newspaper reports on cryptocurrency, and total number of transactions. The paper also reports on the first global survey of merchants who have adopted this technology, and we model the share of sales paid for with this alternative currency, using both ordinary and Tobit regressions. Our analysis examines how country-, customer-, and company-specific characteristics interact with the proportion of sales attributed to Bitcoin. We find that company features, use of other payment methods, customers’ knowledge about Bitcoin, and the size of both the official and unofficial economy are significant determinants. The results will be of interest to traders who seek to understand factors driving prices and will help to inform vendors as to the most favorable circumstances for adopting the currency for online transactions.

This paper investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed an important aspect of everyday life, viz. how people make payments. The empirical study is based on a survey of over 5000 respondents from 22 European countries. It shows that consumers who had been making cashless payments prior to the outbreak of the pandemic have been even more likely to do so since it broke out. On the other hand, the consumers who had mostly been paying in cash have often continued to do so. The divide between those who pay in cash and those who do not, therefore, seems to have widened during the pandemic. It may suggest financial inclusion issues. Additionally, we found that the probability of more frequent cashless payments as a result of the pandemic differs considerably between countries and therefore indicate the role of country-specific factors.

The health crisis caused by COVID-19 has affected consumption and payment patterns worldwide. Consumers have had to change their habits and deal with new sanitation guidelines and have often struggled with lengthy infrastructure closures. These factors significantly influenced both the choice of payment methods and purchase decisions made by consumers. Still, consumption patterns during the pandemic as a new social situation have not yet been thoroughly investigated. As the unsustainable consumption of resources is an important issue, this paper aims to analyze the relationship between credit card use, hedonic motivations, and its impact on the impulsive buying behavior in physical fast fashion stores during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. For this purpose, an online survey was conducted on a sample of 300 regular fast fashion buyers in physical stores. Structural equation modelling was used for the data analysis. The results show that there is a significant relationship between credit card use and impulse buying behavior for fast fashion in physical stores, as well as between credit card use and social shopping. It is also observed that hedonic motivations such as gratification shopping, value shopping, novelty-seeking shopping, and adventure-seeking shopping are related to impulse buying behavior. Therefore, this evidences the unsustainable overconsumption, thereby having a higher negative environmental and social impact. With the increased popularity of cashless payment methods, including credit cards relaxing tighter budgets during the pandemic, fast fashion impulse buying should be considered an important issue in individual, social and environmental well-being. Consequently, the need for more responsible consumption and sustainability-focused value orientation arises so as to mitigate the environmental impact of the fast fashion industry.

We propose a novel approach for the time efficiency study of payment process at Point-Of-Sale (POS). A wide range of payment methods from cash and standard cards to contactless cards, RFID stickers and mobile payments (NFC and remote) was analysed. Transactions were timed by means of digital chronography of video material recorded in the biggest chain of convenience stores in Poland. Our results confirm that cash is a significantly faster payment method than traditional payment card with a magnetic stripe or EMV chip. However, the innovative payment methods, such as contactless cards and NFC mobile payments, are competitive to cash in terms of time efficiency. Contactless cards used in offline mode and without printing paper slips are the first popular electronic payment method in history faster than cash. Our results could be applied to optimise the payment process at POS as well as to develop innovative and efficient payment solutions.

The role of regulatory sandboxes in the development of innovations on the financial services market: the case of the United Kingdom