The revolution in the mobile commerce domain has amended the rules of how online sellers approach customers, reap loyalty, and sell their products or services to them. Global players in the ecommerce industry have realized the fact that mobile commerce is a way to succeed and move ahead. The recent years have been witnessing an explosive growth of the mobile commerce industry and it is doubled even more after the corona wave. Popularly named as m-commerce, mobile commerce has helped businesses get into the pockets. The concept of shopping anytime from anywhere, with an internet facility, inexpensively and conveniently, is what planted the spotlights over mobile commerce. With the progress in wireless communication, m-commerce has become the new standard for personal communication without any geographical barriers, age limitations, or any other hurdles. To put m-commerce into a definition, we can frame it as:
A direct or indirect transaction is facilitated on handheld mobile devices such as mobile phones, tablets, etc. that are connected through wireless networks across the globe.
An Introduction to Mobile Commerce
Mobile Commerce or m-commerce is a subset of electronic commerce or ecommerce. The major difference between ecommerce and m-commerce is the way the businesses are operated. In ecommerce, the services are comparatively less personalized than in m-commerce. Mobile commerce has greatly impacted businesses and applications in many ways. One of the major benefits businesses avail from mobile commerce is the making offices paperless with nearly low or nil employees required operating the business. Online consumers have embraced the more convenient technology of mobile commerce in their day-to-day lives in a way that today they cannot imagine a life without m-commerce. Due to the in-built characteristics of mobile commerce such as pervasiveness, flexibility, personalization, and propagation, it promises remarkable productivity, immense market potential, and increased profitability.
Although the world is witnessing tremendous growth of the ecommerce industry with the arrival of m-commerce, it has a few downsides too. M-commerce industries need to face the challenges in order to survive in this huge market with bottomless potentials. In this blog, we will be taking a closer look at the biggest problems that are imposed on mobile commerce. Keep reading and educate yourself to stay up-to-date, ahead of the competition, and make the best and right use of m-commerce in your businesses.
What are the biggest problems for mobile commerce?
Constraints of Mobile Devices
Handheld wireless devices that are in use today include mobile phones, PDA (Personal Digital Assistants), tablets, palm-sized computers/ laptops, etc. Although flexibility and mobility are two of the most outstanding benefits of mobile commerce, they miss out on a few elements when compared to computers. The majority of the mobile devices have limited display potential, including small screen size and low resolution, restricted, and intricate input options as a result of a multifunctional small keypad. The need for creating lightweight and small mobile devices limits the development of user-friendly graphical applications and interfaces. Also, mobile devices have definite computational power, processing surf ability, memory, limited battery life, and disc capacity. All these limitations do not vote for complex apps and transactions and may lead to the restricted use of mobile commerce.
In order to manage multi-channel selling, a multi-tasking operating system is an essential feature. Another feature for smartphones to be able to facilitate m-commerce is that it should have an actual QUERTY keyboard. The next feature required is the QVGA (Quarter Video Graphics Array) or a high-resolution display that is essential for the modern functionalities of the devices. Although the innovations in smartphones and technologies make it an ideal platform for mobile commerce, it still lacks quite a few features that are already accessible in computers. User satisfaction is the core to the success of mobile commerce and therefore, the limitations of mobile devices must be resolved at the earliest to deliver a smooth shopping experience to online consumers.
Hostile Conditions
When developing a strategy for mobile commerce, the bottom line remains the conditions at which the consumers browse, which keeps changing with every consumer at various times. In order to provide a personalized experience in mobile commerce, not delivering a solution based on the conditions can work against you. The m-commerce apps and services need to cater to these capricious conditions which are especially important in sensitive regions of the service such as checkout.
Redundant Options
The development of smartphone technologies has gone exorbitant. The leading innovations including the ones in iPhones as well as Android devices have led to so much convenience that every Tom, Dick, and Harry owns as well as makes the best use of a smartphone, today. However, the mass usage of smartphones leads to confusion, especially among the retailers wherein the typical issue lies between the app and mobile sites.
Small Screens
Although we say that m-commerce has led to carrying commerce wherever you go, this remains the biggest problem in mobile commerce to date. The limited space in the mobile app requires the usage of the smaller image, smaller text, and more number of pages so that the customers can get all information regarding the product if they wish to know. For instance, the ecommerce giants and learned the game of mobile commerce quite well by considering the thought that the customer knows nothing about the product when they visit the page and make sure to let the customers know everything about it with the information provided. Therefore, businesses need to do additional research and learn to cope with the issues of small screens and make sure that they are delivering an equally satisfactory experience in their mobile commerce services as in ecommerce.
Payment Troubles
The tiny keyboard seen in mobile devices makes it harder for people to type the credit card number and other details that are not experienced when using a computer. Apart from the obvious outcome of errors in typing, there are concerns for the security of saving the payment details in the mobile apps as well. The reason being, mobile devices are more prone to get stolen or misplaced which increases the risk of data theft and misuse of payment cards for fraudulent transactions.
Development of Mobile Devices
The mobile device manufacturers are in constant attempts to come out with better, faster, and innovative smartphones and other devices to get a competitive advantage. In fact, the newer versions of the various OS (Operating Systems) are also getting brainy, every passing day. The online sellers need to keep up with this speedy evolution and make the necessary software as well as hardware updates at the right time to sell more and fulfill the customer requirements. It is quite a big challenge for online sellers in the m-commerce industry to stay alert round the clock, 365 days, to ensure that their services do not fall behind the rat race in the market.
The Dilemma in Mobile Apps and Responsive Website
In order to know the customers’ requirements, m-commerce businesses often face the dilemma of choosing between mobile apps and responsive websites. Although both the options have their own merits and demerits, mobile apps are considered to be a good start to selling online. However, since creating a mobile app is considered to be a more expensive option, many businesses build a responsive website first and then consider the other option as a website alone is not sufficient to sell online efficiently. However, we have a surprise for you! You can create a responsive website as well as a mobile app with a single payment using Builderfly. There are a few plans from which you can choose and you can create both, your website as well as a mobile app. Also, you can check out the platform with the 14-days free trial period, after which you can customize your store, connect your domain, as well as develop an AI-powered mobile app, all without being a technical expert.
Streamlining the Buying Experience
Mobile commerce is a highly crowded market as there are dozens of mobile-friendly websites and applications out there who are selling the same products as you do. With offering discounts and coupons becoming a boring option and the prices of the products being more and more similar, the focus falls on streamlining the buying experience of the consumers. However, with the continuously changing trends, it has become quite tricky to beat the giants and other competitors with out-of-the-box solutions in the m-commerce industry.
Conclusion
Various ecommerce giants as well as businesses are promoting and encouraging the use of mobile commerce by offering mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites for their services. However, m-commerce is still needed to be completely utilized in developing nations. The dearth of business and wireless infrastructure, customer indifference, and poor input as well as display capabilities in smartphones along with the fear of learning new things are a few factors that hinder and constraint the popularity of mobile commerce in the developing world. Moreover, even in developed nations, mobile commerce has lead customers to become dubious slowing down mobile banking services.
