Mobile commerce versus e-commerce: consumer behavior and cross-cultural differences

Mobile Devices and Importance of Research

The importance of this research surrounds the manner in which mobile devices are transforming modern life -- not just smartphones, but tablets, smaller laptops, integration into automobile and televisions and a commercial transaction that will top $3.2 trillion by 2017 compared to $1.5 trillion in mid-2013. This is astounding when one realizes that a sampling of consumers from some stores show that 80% of their clientele use their mobile device to do research and over 1/2 of those surveyed used their mobile device for some sort of shopping resource in April 2013 (Dishman, 2013). Since 2010, in fact, was a watershed year for merchants and the idea of increasing their presence for mobile devices; in fact merchants are increasingly looking to increase their mobile presence based on the fact that the costs are far less than many overly complex e-commerce sites (See Figure 1). (Siwicki, 2011).

While there has been a decent amount of research in the last decade or so on e-commerce, much of it has ignored the m-commerce area. The Internet mobile handset has now engendered worldwide penetration, largely due to its personal nature and sophisticated communication technologies. However, it is important to note that unlike e-commerce research, empirical research into m-commerce is still in its infancy; often reasoned due to the lack of standards in terms of concepts, theories and overall psychological paradigms that fit a scholarly approach to the data (Okki, 2005). Our approach to the research will expand the paradigm of definitions of mobile services classification that will build upon research from a 2005 attempt to classify and define the research. To completely understand m-commerce within a global perspective, for instance, we must look at the way mobile Internet services classifications that have four primary paradigmatic axes: person interactive and machine interactive (See Table 1):

Table 1 - Model for M-Commerce

Goal Orientation

Experiential Modeling

Person-Interactive

Information

Messaging

Machine Interactive

Payment

Gaming

(Marginally Adapted from: Nysveen, H., et al., 2005)