The Development of M-commerce

1.6.3 The Development of M-commerce

Ten trends of the m-commerce: Trend One: Commercial speculation of Internet will reach the zenith. The mobile carriers and communication products manufacturers are bound to

publicize widely centering on mobile network in that they have invested enormous fund into data communication equipments and business certificate. These companies will do their best to arouse consumers and accept this correspondence method. IDC reckoned that there were over a billion cellular phones all over the world with the access to Internet in 2003. Certainly not all of these cellular phones will be used for web surfing.

Trend Two: The business application will become the center and focus of m-commerce. Thanks to wireless client relationship management (CRM), marketing management and other business applications, business consumers will prosper both in income and working efficiency. Therefore, the publicity focus of carriers will not on customers but m-commerce business application.

Trend Three: The consumer use mobile equipment is not for business and transaction but information.

Consumers are mainly to acquire such information as e-mails, stock, weather, the journey route and flight etc. by mobile phones. Though these services do not represent the direct commercial opportunities, they contribute to establishment of client relations and indirect commercial opportunities creation.

Trend Four: M-commerce will take on a new look by embedding optical bar-code reader into mobile phones.

It is predicted that cellular phones embedded with optical bar-code reader will come into market, which will bridge the traditional trade and Interne trade. Data transmission will be tackled by the embedded optical bar-code reader, which makes m-commerce to step into a higher stage. IDC predicted that this function will be extremely useful for those professional commercial career men.

Trend Five: display screen of intelligence hand-hold equipments will be improved, but it is difficult to input tables and initial data.

Introduction to E-commerce

Mobile phones with display screen of higher resolution and optical bar-code reader will be friendly accepted by customers, but do not anticipate the occurrence of miracle. The narrow display screen and trivial data input methods are still the main obstruction of the utility and functions of Internet. IDC anticipated that it is impossible to improve data input methods and the size of display screen in the near future.

Trend Six: The mobile security will become an issue. As people make use of mobile equipments to have access to Internet, much

attention is paid to the security of them such as PC, which becomes prominent with the undertaking of data share and increasing of mobile equipments functions. Though currently the number of global user of mobile equipments with the capacity of the data transmission has come to many a million, most of these equipments are almost without any security mechanism.

Trend Seven: Voice network navigation is still under study. Though it seems that voice is the most natural interface of mobile equipments,

there will not be breakthrough progress in its research in the short term, that is, nothing will be put into practice.

Trend Eight: Though the mobile communication equipments combining various functions, many other types of equipment still exist concurrently.

It is impossible for an equipment to replace others, though currently many communication equipment combining various functions. PDA manufacturers will add telephone function to their products and mobile phones manufactures will add PDA function to their products. If so, it will definitely increase volume, weight and cost of the equipments, which will not be accepted by most people.

Trend Nine: The advertisement of wireless communication equipment will continue to grow. Trend Ten: carriers should transform their sale strategies. The strategy of carriers is going to change, though it has continuously been on

customers. Along with more and more commercial application services have been put into practice, it can be foreseen that the sales object of Mobile carriers will not be on terminating customers but on enterprise users. Those carriers who are successful in strategy transfer will win the market share on the one hand; benefit their customers on the other hand.

Generally speaking, the time has been or is ripe for the development of the characteristic M-commerce that will have an inviting prospect. Superficially, the technical progress and the security breakthrough have promoted M-commerce to develop into a traditional e-commerce. However, essentially, they are distinguishing from each other: E-commerce translates into electronic business, among which B-B is more popular than B-C. While M-commerce will take a different road, for which the driving force is banking service, stock transaction and various tickets booking.

1 Fundamentals of E-commerce