Understanding user intention to adopt marketplace functionalities in digital wallets: The case of Yape in Peru

The rapid expansion of digital wallets in Latin America has reshaped how users interact with financial and retail services. Despite Yape’s leadership in Peru—with over 14 million active users and nearly 466 million monthly transactions—a low percentage of users engage with its marketplace functionalities, limiting its transition toward a super app model. At the firm level, this underuse constrains Yape’s ability to generate additional revenue streams, strengthen customer loyalty, and leverage data-driven insights from retail transactions. At the macro level, greater adoption of marketplace services could stimulate the digital payments ecosystem by enhancing transaction volume, inclusion, and innovation. To address this gap, this study examines the factors that drive users' intention to use Yape’s marketplace by integrating two-sided market theory and the E-SERVQUAL framework. A structural model combining platform quality dimensions (efficiency, availability, fulfillment, privacy) and supply-side attributes (discounts and promotions, variety) was tested through a quantitative design using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) on data collected from 167 respondents in Lima. Results show that privacy, discounts and promotions, and product variety significantly influence intention to use, underscoring that marketplace adoption depends on both technological reliability and the perceived value of merchant offerings within digital wallet ecosystems. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.