Kearney-Amazon Pay survey of 6K consumers and 1K merchants in 120 Indian cities: 90% prefer digital transactions, 46% of the transactions are digital, and more
Bhupendra Paintola / Inc42 Media :
Context & Ripple Effects
The survey offers a consumer-and-merchant snapshot of a payments market that had already moved beyond the early wallet-adoption phase. India’s homegrown UPI payments network had established a shared digital-payment rail used by hundreds of millions of individuals and tens of millions of merchants.
The gap between the 90% preference figure and digital transactions’ 46% share matters: it suggests that willingness to pay digitally is ahead of complete behavioral conversion at the point of sale.
First-order effects
- Merchants and payment providers gain evidence that digital-payment acceptance is now an expected customer experience across the surveyed cities, even though cash and other methods still account for a majority of transactions.
- The findings reinforce the commercial case for making digital checkout reliable and visible, rather than treating it as a niche alternative—a marked change from the earlier period when providers saw low digital-payment usage as the opportunity.
Second-order effects
- Payment apps, acquiring providers, and merchants will compete more on acceptance quality and repeat use, since broad consumer preference alone does not guarantee that every transaction is completed digitally.
- As more merchants optimize for digital acceptance, the advantage shifts toward payment networks and providers that can serve both frequent consumer use and fragmented merchant needs.
Third-order effects
- If the preference-to-usage gap continues to narrow, India’s payments market could move from adoption-led growth to competition over distribution, merchant service, and transaction economics.
- The survey is another signal of payment infrastructure becoming routine commerce infrastructure; the pace of that shift still depends on whether merchant acceptance and consumer usage expand together.
The trend: India’s digital-payments market is progressing from early consumer adoption toward ubiquitous merchant acceptance and everyday transaction use.