Consumers' perception and opinion about mobile commerce activities play a very important role in their success. Industry people should understand consumers' worries, fears and phobias Slow connections, privacy and threat of government regulation has played an important role in limiting the growth of mobile commerce. Lack of information about mobile commerce is also one of the biggest problems being faced by the industry people. Moreover, most consumers are not totally convinced about buying something from their mobile devices as they do not consider it a satisfactory experience. Sticking to the traditional ways of shopping is another major factor in the slow growth of mobile commerce. Mobile customers have raised expectations in terms of service, convenience, speed of delivery. The difficult tasks for m-commerce is to ensure consumers' trust by making them feel comfortable with wireless transactions. It is important to find solutions to their consumer problems and serve them better than the competitors and provide them with relevant incentives to keep them coming back again.
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Mobile commerce is a fast developing concept. Just a decade before, nobody could image that there will be a concept called mobile commerce. But over the last few years, there has been enormous progress in the development of digital technologies. This has led to the massive spread of mobile devices in our society, in particular the mobile phones and that too smart phones. People use these devices for many reasons starting with communicating with each other, taking pictures, listening to music, playing games and many others. Thanks to mobile internet access using mobile phones in the decision making process of product purchase is also becoming increasingly popular and is making deep roads into the day to day lives of the common man of the country. The high penetration rate of mobile phones has even given companies an opportunity to affect consumers in different ways. More and more businesses choose to use this tool to carry out marketing functions. Mobile advertisements, as one of the most important marketing activities have been around for many years now. But, along with growing abilities of mobile phones and increasing access to mobile internet the phenomenon of mobile commerce is gradually becoming more and more important.
In recent years, people use their mobile phones more frequently to connect to the Internet. This is the effect of the upcoming of 3G and 4G services, reducing telecommunications charges for the use of mobile Internet access, including in particular the introduction of special tariff plans allowing unlimited data transfer. With the technological developments taking place at a fast pace, mobile phones are constantly evolving resulting in the upcoming of the smart phones of today, which are very much like small computers. Mobile technologies allow companies to carry out various activities, usually aimed at communicating with current and potential customers. Customers can be reached using a wide variety of mobile communication channels. Short text messages (SMS) campaigns have been there for many years as the most popular type of mobile advertisement. Nowadays, they are increasingly being replaced by multimedia messages (MMS) campaigns, which can contain graphics, audio or video messages. With the upcoming of various mobile applications, the utility of this medium for mobile commerce has increased many-fold.
According to a report by Boston Consulting Group, there is an ample scope of mobile commerce in India. At present, India has over 800 million mobile subscribers, including 240 million with bank accounts, and 20 million with credit cards; there are 88,000 bank branches and 70,000 cash points. The additional fact is that the half of Indian households is still unbanked, including 42 percent holding at least one mobile phone. The latest BCG report has also projected that the fee-based revenue from mobile commerce could be well over $4.5 billion by 2015 in India. Banks, mobile service providers and device manufacturers all have considerable opportunity to generate this revenue and popularize the concept of m-commerce in our country.
It has been found that more and more people use their mobile phones to make purchases. Indeed, contemporary consumers increasingly use mobile phones in the decision making process of the purchase of goods and services. With built-in web browser or a dedicated application, mobile users can search for information about products and even make a purchase. It is a new trend that can lead to fundamental changes in contemporary business. Mobile commerce (or simply m-commerce) refers to conducting any transaction through a mobile device using mobile technologies. Transactions can be initiated or completed by using different portable devices, such as mobile phone or tablet. M-commerce has also given rise to the concept of “showrooming”, which happens when a customer goes to the retail outlets to check out about the product, its features, price, promotional policies, and takes the live demonstration of the product, but instead of buying it from that store, they find the same product at cheaper prices on various mobile apps and finally prefer buying product from those apps.