Payment-Method Choice and Checkout Friction in Saudi Food Delivery and Quick Commerce: Evidence from Public Data

Saudi Arabia's shift to electronic payments has coincided with rapid growth in app-based delivery, making the payment step a key point of failure in food delivery and quick commerce. This paper combines public data from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), the Transport General Authority (TGA), the SAMA rulebook and industry reports to describe how payment-method choice and checkout friction are changing in the sector. Electronic payments rose from 70% of retail payment transactions in 2023 to 85% in 2025, while quarterly delivery orders grew by about two-thirds between Q1 2025 and Q2 2026, to more than 132 million. Online card spending grew roughly three times faster than in-store spending in 2024, and industry estimates place device wallets as the leading online method, with cash on delivery reduced to a small tail. Building on these findings and on prior work on cart abandonment in food delivery apps, the paper proposes a four-stage checkout-friction framework covering method selection, authentication, authorisation, and settlement and fulfilment. It derives five testable propositions on wallet defaults, authentication delays, COD removal, BNPL thresholds and payment-failure churn. The paper closes with implications for platforms, merchants and regulators, including a call for official method-level e-commerce payment statistics and category-level delivery data.