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Top1. Introduction
Quick response code (QR-code) starts as a barcode with a special purpose, which is for use in supermarkets. In the 1960s, Japan experienced a wave of rapid economic growth. Supermarkets also experience this wave in Japan. So they realised that they needed a way to keep track of everything. QR-code was first created by Hara Masahiro, an engineer for Denso Wave, a Toyota subsidiary, to help in the manufacturing process. QR-code first used in Japan's Kanban, a type of electronic communication tool used in the automotive industry (Stein, 2020). QR-code was used in manufacturing and expanded to the logistics and retailing industry. The use of QR-code grows rapidly in various industries because of its advantages. In the marketing field, QR-code had been used widely to understand consumer behaviour (Trivedi et al., 2019), market research (Tolliver-Walker, 2011), retailing, and marketing communication (Watson et al., 2013).
In January 2015, the Malaysian government introduced the E-Tunai Rakyat initiative to develop the trend of using mobile payment (The Sun Daily, 2020). The trend of mobile payment has encouraged many industries to adopt a Quick response code (QR-code) payment system to establish effective operating business ways. At the beginning of its use in Malaysia, the banking and retail industry has begun the first step by providing mobile scanning services to provide fast and comfortable services to customers in making payments. Although cash payments still play an essential role in the country, accounting for more than 80% of transactions (Amarthalingan, 2017), but with the increasing use and mobile subscriptions, as well as the growing penetration of the internet, the use of E-wallets in Malaysia continues to increase. In March and April 2020, E-wallet usage has reached 40% (Azahar, 2020). Compared to other mobile payment methods, QR-code is seen as the most promising technology in remote payments, gaining higher popularity among consumers and merchants (Chua, 2017). Due to lower infrastructure costs and a high penetration rate of mobile phones in Malaysia, it is predicted that QR-code has the potential to become a cost-effective alternative to cash in the near future (Amarthalingam, 2017).
Even though the number of QR-code mobile payment platforms is slowly increasing, little is known about the service’s adoption. Most of the research contributes to the more in-depth analysis of security, privacy, fraud, and risk of a QR-code mobile payment system (e.g. Zhuang et al., 2017). A handful of researchers have examined a single aspect of consumers' attitudes toward using and accepting QR-code (Trivedi et al., 2019). However, only a few empirical studies have been conducted to understand consumer’s adoption intention towards mobile payment in an emerging market (Patil et al., 2020). Therefore, it remains a research gap in Malaysia as studying a particular mobile payment system is insufficient to establish a generalisation of consumers' behaviour towards the acceptance of mobile payment.