Mobile Commerce Adoption in Spain: The Influence of Consumer Attitudes and ICT Usage Behaviour

Introduction

Information and Computer Technologies (ICTs) are currently experiencing spectacular growth, especially as they enter our homes. People are becoming increasingly familiar with the use of Internet and also the new mobile terminals such as personal data assistants.

With the rapid development of modern wireless communication technology, coupled with the increasingly high penetration rate of Internet, M-commerce is becoming increasingly important for firms and consumers (Nysveen, Pedersen and Thorbjorsen, 2007; Wu and Wang, 2005; Yang, 2005). According to Wireless Week (2004) there were 94.9 million M-Commerce users worldwide in 2003 and the segment is expected to grow to 1.67 billion by 2008. Global income from M-Commerce was $6.86 billion in 2003 and is expected to reach $554.37 billion in 2008 (Wireless Week, 2004).

Unctad (2002) defines M-commerce as the buying and selling of goods and services using wireless hand-held devices such as mobile telephones or personal data assistants (PDAs). Such transactions include mobile banking, investing, shopping and services. This chapter accordingly defines M-shopper as “the consumer who buys goods and services by using mobile access to computer-mediated networks with the help of an electronic device”.

A Mobile service is an activity or series of intangible activities that occur when mobile consumers interact with service providers. There are various categories of Mobile services (Rao and Troshani, 2007): (i) mobile content and information services (map and location-based services, news, personalization and entertainment content downloads) that make information available to mobile users; (ii) messaging services (SMS), multimedia messaging services (MMS) and email that enable the exchange of text and multimedia information; (iii) transaction-based services that enable transactions such as mobile banking.

The increased mobile usage in recent years is a clear example of the growth of mobile services as it offers significant opportunities as independent sales channel – deserving special attention from researchers. While published work on M-commerce applications and technologies and the different mobile operators and their services is becoming more abundant and representative, there is a lack of sufficient literature on the profile of users who buy products/services through the different mobile operators and on the analysis of the factors which most influence M-commerce patronage.

Insufficient user acceptance has long been an obstacle to the successful adoption of information technologies. As the future commercial success of Mobile technologies and applications depends to some extent on whether current Mobile users also use this medium for product purchases, it becomes crucial for managers to analyze which variables determine M-commerce adoption in order to assign resources effectively to obtain competitive advantages.

Previous research into Mobile Commerce has mainly focused on its adoption in the context of high E-commerce adoption rates regions such as Norway or Finland (Nysveen et al., 2007; Skog, 2002) and to a lesser extent in developing regions such as Taiwan (Wu and Wang, 2004; Luarn and Lin, 2004). This study offers an insight into Mobile Commerce adoption in Spain, which has not previously been investigated.

The chapter aims to present an in-depth study of the factors influencing Mobile Commerce adoption. The chapter’s specific goals are to: