What is Mobile Commerce?
Mobile commerce (also known as mobile ecommerce, m-commerce and other variations) consists of two primary components. The first is the ability to use a wireless phone or other mobile device to conduct financial transactions and exchange payments over the Internet. The second is the ability to deliver information that can facilitate a transaction — from making it easy for your business to be “found” via a mobile Web browser to creating mobile marketing campaigns such as text promotions and loyalty programs.
Why Should You Care?
Just as the Internet and ecommerce revolutionized the way we promote, market, shop for and buy goods and services, wireless devices and mobile commerce are poised to create another revolution in the world of commerce.
As the use of Internet-enabled wireless devices skyrockets, people want to use these devices to do more things. App stores and hundreds of thousands of applications have sprung up to accommodate demand for applications, games and other services. But just as we saw in the early days of ecommerce, privacy, security, usability and interoperability issues have slowed the pace of mobile commerce adoption in the early going — among both sellers and buyers.
However, with the Internet in our pocket or purse, it’s only a matter of time before mobile commerce really takes off. Mobile devices go where we go, and track where we are. The technology makes it easy to find a nearby pizza place and order a pizza, order theater tickets from your car, or check out price comparisons and reviews from a store.
Mobile applications and devices are getting more personal too: based on past history, they can anticipate our needs and promote goods and services to fulfill them. Still not convinced? Think about this: Amazon recently announced that “in the last twelve 12 months, customers around the world have ordered more than $1 billion of products from Amazon using a mobile device.”
Big retailers and companies are investing to make mobile commerce easier, more convenient and more secure. As they do, consumers will become more comfortable with making purchases over their BlackBerrys, iPhones, Androids, iPads and mobile devices we have yet to imagine.
If you sell your vegetables at farmer markets, or your home-made jewelry at craft fairs, or if you deliver pizzas to apartments or dorm rooms, its easy to see how being able to take credit card transactions on your mobile device could help you boost sales and repeat business. You don’t need to limit your sales to people that can pay by cash or check.
Customers that don’t have a checkbook can still buy from you, and they’re not limited by the amount of cash in their pockets. Furthermore, you can easily capture their contact information and follow up with other promotions. Meanwhile, if you run a hair salon, you could use mobile marketing to let customers know when you have openings or send them appointment reminders.
What to Consider
We are still early on in the mobile commerce era. But, as large retailers embrace mobile commerce, small retailers will need to gear up to provide convenient and secure mobile payment and commerce options. Now is a great time to develop a mobile commerce strategy to help differentiate your business. Some key areas to consider include
1. Do you need a mobile Web site? While it may be tempting to try to optimize your existing website for mobile devices, this often results in a clunky and hard-to-navigate site on a small screen. Consider building a separate, streamlined site geared to mobile users. Register it as a mobile site with search engines so it shows up in mobile searches, and provide a link to your mobile site from your main website. Check out services such as Mobify, which helps create mobile-friendly websites.
2. How can you best promote your business to mobile users? You can, for instance, send text messages to customers about specials and discounts. Or a group of retailers on Main Street could team up to offer joint loyalty programs — buy something at one store, get 20 percent off at the next — to help compete more effectively with one-stop big box stores. SMS text messaging services such as Fanminder, Ez Texting and Ruxter, which helps businesses create a mobile website, and share messages with customers and members.
3. Don’t be a pest. You want to use mobile commerce for good, not evil, so make sure that customers can decide and opt-in if they want to get your promotions via their cell phones–or not.
4. Set up your business for mobile commerce payments. More vendors are starting to offer mobile commerce solutions geared to small and medium business requirements and budgets. These solutions let you take payments on your mobile device, and also send an email or text invoice to the customer. Wireless carriers, credit card companies and software companies are all introducing mobile commerce solutions; start by assessing solutions from vendors you already use and trust.
5. Think about integration. Integrating mobile commerce transactions with your accounting and contact management solutions can help save time and increase efficiency. Good news — If you are one of the millions of small businesses using Intuit or Sage accounting solutions — Intuit GoPayments and Sage Exchange provide integration with their respective accounting and financial solutions.
6. Be sure that it’s secure. Fraudulent activities can be an issue with mobile commerce, and compliance requirements and fines for fraudulent activities — never mind the damage to business credibility — are serious. Businesses considering mobile commerce need to verify that the mobile commerce payments vendor is PA-DSS compliant, which means that its solution has met global security standards created by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council to prevent payment applications from storing prohibited secure data, such as magnetic stripe, PIN or CVV2 numbers.
Remember, it took some time for businesses to develop ecommerce sites and for customers to feel comfortable using their credit cards on the Web. Today, mobile commerce is in its infancy, but given the explosion of Internet-enabled mobile devices coupled with consumers’ desire for speed and convenience, mobile commerce is destined to be the next big game-changer.
