Mobile Commerce: Shopping on Your Wireless Device = mCommerce is Here…for others….Wake Up!

I love new ideas, I love identifying new trends, and eTaildTail.com loves helping people implement new ideas that will “intuitively” help other people.  Mobile commerce, herein forever referred to as mCommerce, is one of those ideas.
 
Some folks might have you believe that mCommerce is not “yet” an effective way to market your product catalog to would be buyers to make money....

Some folks say to wait and see how mCommerce technology develops and “maybe” jump in when the time is “right.” 

I am here to say that the time is right for the proper product catalog AND the time is right for all online merchants to explore mCommerce and understand how it works.  Why?

1. look at any person under the age of 30 -- they check their wireless device at least every 5 minutes...all day long
2. look at any next generation, wireless device -- the screens are becoming bigger, and easy to use and navigate
3. use any next generation, wireless device – see how easy it is to find and call a store, restaurant, shop, or whatever online
4. we all love innovation
5. wireless devices are making it fun and easier to shop online, and
6. all wireless carriers are making “shopping platforms” easier to use

If you still are not convinced, let me just say that in the past 5 years we have used the internet for a myriad of reasons. 

We, as a collective whole worldwide, have processed more information, ideas, videos, photos, and data in 5 years online than in the entire history of mankind of all other types of communication combined. 

And the real fun part?  Many experts believe that mankind has only just begun to use the power of communication that the internet provides to us.  Yes folks, we are at the beginning, not the middle and, certainly, not the end of the internet revolution.

And for those who are practical, utilitarian types, I offer the following.

According to US Census Bureau News, online retail commerce purchases (not including travel and rental cars) were approximately:

2001 = $32 billion
2006 = $108 billion
2007 = $175 billion (estimate)

Not a bad trend.

Now how about mCommerce? The numbers across the board are not consistent (and you can find statistics that certainly differ from the below) but, according to Jupiter Research, which is the most conservative, here are some estimated numbers:

2002 $100 million
2003 $200 million
2004 $275 million
2005 $400 million
2006 $450 million
2007 $500-1.0 billion (estimate) ???

mmmm...not a bad trend either.

Yes, I am an optimist but I am also a realist.  mCommerce is not for every online merchant, today.  Probably the best prospects for mCommerce are online merchants whose product catalog lends itself to quick purchases. These might include, gift type of items, flowers, gift baskets, sports equipment, luggage, shoes and other products that most people already know about.  But this is not to say that you should not try it, even if your product catalog does not fit into a perfect little box, and if you have some time to explore the possibilities, do it!

To these points, I refer to a recent article by JESSICA E. VASCELLARO and AMOL SHARMA, who wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal an article about mCommerce.  Here is an excerpt:

Please CLICK HERE for full article:

“Feeling guilty about leaving his wife behind during an extended business trip, Richard Davis sprang for a last-minute gift. Sitting on the runway at Boston's Logan Airport, he pulled out his BlackBerry, launched Digby -- a free shopping application he had downloaded to his device -- and purchased a bouquet of flowers, along with a miniature teddy bear, from retailer FTD.com with just a few clicks.

"My wife was really pleased," says Mr. Davis, 46 years old, who works for investment bank Needham & Co. LLC and lives in Wellesley, Mass. "It's pretty nice to be able to shop online from a hand-held."

Retailers and wireless companies have been buzzing about enabling consumers to purchase everything from flowers to flat-screen television sets from their mobile phones for years. But mobile versions of popular online Web sites like Amazon.com have been slow to catch on because they have been difficult to find and can be painfully slow to load.
Now new services, many of which are being offered for the first time through wireless carriers, are trying to make mobile commerce more mainstream. While many still require multiple steps and an agility with small screens, they are making mobile shopping easier through better interfaces, wider selections and more secure payment options.”

So what are your options if you are interested in mCommerce? 

In other words, if you want to immediately see if there is value in mCommerce for you, and you can afford to try it, look into it now.  Don’t trust the “pundits,” who pontificate that they know everything and might have you believe that mCommerce is not ready for you. Instead, call the mCommerce experts and go from there. 

As I am always fond of saying, if you have time to explore the landscape of possibilities to make more sales, especially if those possibilities are affordable to test, why not try them?

Here are a few good companies - and I am sure that there are many more that I am missing – to call and ask if an mCommerce solution is worth pursuing today.  By the way, I have spoken to all of them and they are more than happy to help and educate you about mCommerce and how it might work for you:

mShopper, which just launched mCommerce search functionality with Sprint and has access to over 7 million products.

mPoria, which helps online merchants build a simple to interface mCommerce friendly website from their existing product catalog and have access to over 10 million products.

Digby, operated by 30 Second Software Inc., stores retailers' best-selling items within an application users download on their BlackBerry, refreshing the selection every night. The company also provides access to more than one million products over the mobile Web.

OpenMarket Exchange, which provides access to the best of both worlds: the financial transparency and rigor expected with an on-network transaction combined with the broad access and merchandising flexibility of an off-network experience.

...and to make any mCommerce transaction safe, trusted and easy, PayPal and Google Checkout interface with many mCommerce applications today.

And don’t forget that AT&T/Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint all have plans to implement more easy to use “friendly platforms” to leverage mCommerce.

So to those who say that mCommerce is not yet ready, I say ready for whom?

It may not be ready for the analysts and the e-commerce experts who don’t have enough data to really understand how mCommerce can work and make grand prognoses….soooooo….while they are getting their heads wrapped around what it all “might” mean, may I suggest that any online merchant spend 30 minutes looking into mCommerce.

mCommerce is certainly ready for the online merchant, who has a product catalog that lends itself to mobile buying behavior patterns today, and it certainly is smart to ready yourself for mCommerce by understanding how it works, so you can ensure that you stay ahead of your competition when it really starts to take off.