Mobile Commerce: play your cards right

Years ago, the Internet enabled transactions anywhere, anytime. Now consumers expect more—they want transactions anywhere, anytime, over any device. And they want it to work reliably and quickly.

As of September 2009, a whopping 70 million people in the United States alone have accessed the Internet from their mobile phones. Mostly they look for information. But they're becoming more and more interested in mobile commerce, or m-commerce. It has the potential to revolutionize the way goods and services are bought and sold. But not all users are on board yet.

Today, mobile commerce is dominated by small value transactions such as ringtone, game and movie purchases. As of late 2009, only about 7% of consumers in the U.S. use mobile commerce. In the world's fastest growing economies—India and China—it's just picking up steam.

Experts have predicted mobile commerce growth for some time. According to Unstrung Insider's report, currently there are 33 million global mobile commerce users, which is expected to grow to 104 million by 2011. ABI Research estimates that revenue from mobile commerce will top US $1.6 Billion in 2009.

So what's the trick? How can service providers help the mobile commerce phenomenon pick up the pace? I have a couple of ideas.

Keep the digital natives happy.
According to a study from Ball State University, college kids are the fastest-growing smartphone segment. More than 75% of respondents to a survey by YouthNet feel they "couldn't live without the Internet." Users who take most readily to mobile commerce channels are these "digital natives"—those who've always had this type of technology in their lives.

But they certainly have high standards. A recent survey by Gomez found that users expect their mobile web experience to be more like the one they have on a computer. They have short attention spans, too. Almost three-quarters of respondents expect simple transactions to be completed in a minute or less.

More than 80% of respondents said that if performance was better, they'd use the mobile Internet more often. Service providers need to continuously upgrade their infrastructure to keep up with increasing bandwidth demands from mobile data and video use.

Keep it clean.
Smartphones don't have as much security built in as PCs. As more and more businesses send their data into the clouds, there's higher risk for smartphone users. Service providers can add value for businesses and end-users by building more security into their networks that can detect and eliminate malware and other forms of malicious attacks.

Mobile commerce can benefit both service providers and businesses. Service providers need well-planned and well-executed strategies to enable mobile commerce to become a new and growing stream of revenue. It'll serve them, and their customers, well in the future.