Mobile Commerce refers to wireless electronic commerce used for conducting commerce or business through a handy device like cellular phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs). It accounts for any transaction including buying and selling of the goods, asking for any services, transferring the ownership or rights, transacting and transferring the money by accessing wireless internet service on the mobile handset itself. Realising its wide potential reach, all major mo-bile handset manufacturing companies are making WAP enabled smart phones and providing the maximum wireless internet and web facilities to pave the way for m-commerce that would prove beneficial to them.
Significant areas of application: M-commerce has several major advantages over its fixed counterparts and due to its characteristics such as ease of use, personalization, flexibility, and easy availability, mobile commerce promises exceptional business market potential, greater efficiency and higher customer satisfaction.
Finance Sector: M-Commerce has wide areas of application in the finance sector by including all major financial institutes, banks and stock market. M-Commerce enables the user to perform banking/finance related activities such as transact/transfer money, bill payment etc and can access them through voice calling or SMS services. Non voice services like the instant alert facility can also be availed.
Telecom Sector: Mobile has played a giant role in communication technology through its versatility and superiority. The ubiquity and ease of use has further made it extremely popular across the globe. It has already surpassed the fixed phones in the world. Software platform is essential for operating any mobile and this tool has revolutionized the communication world because of its functioning as a small computer. The booming popularity has forced the corporate world to develop a new commerce platform that can reach to masses. Mobile commerce has attracted massive traffic because of its unique characteristics. The user can change the service of any financial institute or banks if it gets better products and services or user is dissatisfied with the service of the subscribing company. Services/
Retail Sector: Service/Retail sectors are amongst those sectors, which have nurtured most from mobile commerce. M-Commerce has proved a major boon for these sectors. Several business dealings, hiring carrier/courier services etc can be executed with the implementation of M-Commerce. Information Sector: After the bursting of dotcom bubble, e-commerce has steeped downwards whereas mobile commerce has evolved and flourished. A separate sector has evolved to exercise on this field for the IT experts. The webmasters have skilfully exploited this new area of IT-enabled commerce. In the IT field, mobile commerce has been used massively to deliver financial news, stock updates, sports figures and traffic updates and many more onto a single handheld device „mobile’. Critical Success factors: There have been various factors that affect the success of the implementation of M-Commerce:
Availability of Technology: The availability of mobile devices to users, and the cost of acquiring and using these devices, will be critical to the success of mobile commerce.
Interoperability: It is another critical factor which implies that the service providers must feel secure that their investments will yield benefits in the future. This cannot be achieved until equipment and software offered by different suppliers can be made to work together. This is where interoperability comes into play and becomes an important input to the success of M-Commerce.
Availability of Infrastructure: A mobile infra-structure is made up of service providers, software developers and mobile device manufacturers. In order to ensure a sound infrastructure, service providers must implement a common solution across their own disparate networks so that each sub-scriber has the best possible user access to each network.
Security: Security is undoubtedly one of the most important critical success factors of mobile com-merce. Various factors need to be assessed like: Confidentiality of information – to ensure users that their communications are safe and readable only by the intended recipients, Integrity of data – guaranteeing that message contents are not altered during the transmission between the originator and the recipient and User authentication – ena-bling systems and applications to verify user identities and have the authority to access the re-sources.
Speed and Efficiency: Handheld wireless devices such as smart phones and palmtops present a more constrained computing environment than desktop computers. This can be attributed to the limited battery life, less powerful central processing units, less memory, small displays and slower input methods of the devices. Wireless networks need to overcome these limitations, and still deliver an acceptable user experience.
Implications and future course of business
In this era of cut-throat competition where firms enter and exit the industry in the blink of an eye, m-commerce provides a significant competitive advantage. Mobile commerce can be seen as a means of allowing organisations to be introduced to new markets and new channels within that industry. However, certain factors need to be addressed. Security of transactions, speed, infra-structure and bandwidth need to be considered before the organisations implement m-commerce.
We didn’t need shampoo in sachets till we got it. We were happy bargaining and going from shop to shop till the concept of malls emerged. Change is the name of the game. M-commerce can and is drastically changing the course of many industries.
I just bought a pair of shoes and booked my movie ticket thanks to M-commerce. Way to go….!!!!!!
May 9th, 2011 
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