Carefully choose your (payment) partner: How payment provider reputation influences m-commerce transactions

•We investigated the impact of online vendor and mobile payment provider reputation.•Consumers attribute distinct trusting beliefs towards both market players.•Reputable vendors do not benefit from embedding reputable mobile payment providers.•Less reputable vendors benefit from embedding reputable mobile payment providers.

Due to the fragmentation of the mobile payment market, vendors have a plurality of mobile payment providers they can choose to execute payment processes in the mobile versions of their shops. Besides differences in transaction fees, mobile payment providers can also differ in respect of their reputation. However, it remains unclear how the reputation of mobile payment providers and online vendors interact and affect consumers’ risk perception and transaction intention. Therefore, our study analyses different combinations of mobile payment provider and online vendor reputations and finds that consumers attribute distinct trusting beliefs towards these two types of market players and that these substantially affect consumers’ intentions to transact. While online vendors with low reputation can profit from embedding reputable mobile payment providers, reputable online vendors do not increase transaction likelihood by integrating reputable mobile payment providers compared with less reputable payment providers. For research, the results provide a novel understanding of the interaction of two market players in the m-commerce value chain subject to varying degrees of reputation. For online vendors, our results give direct guidance in the process of selecting external payment entities to establish consumer trust and facilitate transactions.