M-commerce Vs E-commerce which is going to be choice of consumer?

[johnmillergo]

Technology has been improved so much, now its going to be M Commerce ( Mobile Commerce). Will M-commerce totally dominate e-commerce in future?

[NuBlue]

Personally I think not. To me the browsing experience is not very good on a mobile device and for that reason I think most consumers will wait until they are infront of a desktop/laptop before making a purchase

[shopintegrator]

Hi,

I agree with NuBlue. I think it is easier to make the final transaction on your computer even if you may have done some research on your phone.

I would also think that I would be more likely to complete the payment through my mobile if the shops checkout accepted PayPal because this would mean I would not have to enter all my details in to the merchants website (address, credit card etc) on a merchants own checkout process on a mobile handset and instead could rely on the fact that this was already set up and stored in PayPal so all I was doing was entering my PayPal username and password and confirming the payment should be made to the merchant.

[Astaroth]

I think that predicting how technologies will go is always a very difficult task. 15 years ago I doubt that many would have predicted that 1 in 6 pounds spent on shopping is done online.

10 years ago people were predicting the proliferation of WebTV and its equivalent as the mass market way of browsing the web rather than free laptops coming with mobile phones etc.

I think even what is a "mobile phone" is becoming more and more difficult to define, XDA/ MDA etc are closer to a PDA than they are a phone and so what do they count as? An iPhone is somewhere between the two again. Do you count buying things using Internet Explorer/ Safari on a PDA/ mobile/ iPod Touch as "e-commerce" or "m-commerce"?

If you are talking about the previous attempts of using SMS and MMS as a commerce platform rather than a web browser then I personally remain sceptical. I have seen demonstrations of MMS being used to get insurance quotes (ie take a photo of a reg plate from the mobile registered on your policy and they will text you back the premium for that car assuming all other things remain the same - OCR reads the plate and DVLA returns make and model)

That said, it wouldnt be the greatest leap from doing that to sending an MMS of the album you want from your registered phone and Play or Amazon etc dispatching it to you the next day.

[Place of design]

Technology has been improved so much, now its going to be M Commerce ( Mobile Commerce). Will M-commerce totally dominate e-commerce in future?

It all comes down to screen size and usability in the end. If we agree that the apple I phone is as large a screen as one would practacably want on what essentially is a mobile phone (designed to fit in your pocket) - then the answer is no

Whilst Apple and Co are all trying to tell us mobile devices are very usable, and not ignoring the efforts they have made - and for sure the phones can do clever things, the basic problem is the screen size. Whilst screens are flat and one dimensional, and a phone needs to fit in a pocket, then the answer will allways be no

What is notable is that APP's are being pushed. Thats basically because they are one hit wonders designed for a small screen

[wmasters]

There's no way to know for sure how the market will take to the new technology. I think mobile commerce is an important and growing market but I can't see it dominating e-commerce entirely.

Mobile web browsing is too cumbersome at the moment and I don't see that changing while a mobile still needs to be functional as a phone.