Exploring M-Commerce and Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Mobile Phones and Tablets

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile phones and tablets shape a new arena for online commercial activity with unprecedented opportunities and challenges. In this omnipresent mobile environment, understanding consumer behavior constitutes a challenge for m-commerce vendors, as they seek to understand factors that affect it, positively and negatively, and to integrate social media in their mobile strategy and across mobile devices. This paper presents an exploratory qualitative research examining separately mobile phones and tablets and the use of social media, in the context of m-commerce. The results of our qualitative analysis show important factors for m-commerce and social media adoption and use, highlighting the similarities and differences between mobile phones and tablets. Our qualitative results also reveal factors having a negative effect to m-commerce, for both mobile devices. Business opportunities enabled by social media for m-commerce and how these can be leveraged in this promising multiple-device mobile context are also discussed.