Understanding M-Commerce Payment Systems Through the Analytic Hierarchy Process

Money is always an ill-tempted subject; however, few works are done to address the payment issue over online commerce. This paper analyzes currently available e-payment systems and finds the stored-value card to be the best overall payment scheme for online commerce. The paper employs the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a quantitative method of decision-making, to evaluate the performance of four e-payment systems: the credit card, the stored-value card, the smart card, and the telecommunication bill. The results show that the stored-value card has the highest performance among the four options considered. However, our findings pinpoint that a payment alternative with an extremely large customer base, such as the credit card, can be flawed by technological defects but still become the de facto e-payment scheme due to the advantage given by a large customer base. This observation leads us to make the policy suggestion that multiple usages be added to the e-payment systems with higher technological/social merits so that they can gain a critical customer base. Users will benefit as technologically more capable e-payments are widely adopted for online commerce