Buying and selling products and services through mobile devices are the new
trend. A housewife can purchase her kitchen appliances from the comfort of her
living room, a busy person can order lunch from office, one can use mobile
platforms to sell goods and services – all with a few clicks.
What is M-Commerce?
Mobile commerce or simply M-Commerce means engaging users in a buy or sell
process via a mobile device. For instance, when someone buys an Android app or
an iPhone app, that person is engaged in m-commerce. There are a number of
content assets that can be bought and sold via a mobile device such as games,
applications, ringtones, subscriptions etc.
How does M-Commerce Work?
Let’s look at some of the points that you need to remember as a business, while
engaging in m-commerce:
Decide Where to Sell
Before you sell your products or services via m-commerce, you need to decide
what type of outlets or stores suit your business best. Let us suppose you have
created ringtones – you can sell them either at specific third-party outlets or to
independent aggregators who charge you a commission for the service.
You can also sell your ringtones on mobile stores or app stores such as Android
marketplace or App store (Apple). These stores are frequently visited by many
buyers and hence ideal for making sales easily and efficiently. Finally, you can
also sell via your own mobile store by creating a mobile website specifically for
sales or as by setting-up an m-commerce page on your main website.
Set up Mobile Billing
Once you have decided where to sell, the next step is to set up your merchant
account. For instance, you can use third-party services such as PayPal. This is
ideal for small businesses or also large companies. A third-party application makes
it really easy for you as well as your customers to make the payments, but then
they do charge commission on the transaction.
You can also set-up your own billing and payment gateway, but make sure that
you make it really easy for users. Mobile users do not use keyboards or a mouse
so make sure that the design of your m-commerce site is intuitive, with easy
navigation tools and the right display sizes. Basically, make your m-commerce
site optimized for Smartphone users.
Benefits of M-Commerce
The major benefit of engaging in m-commerce is the sheer size of potential sales.
The probability of your potential customers owning a Smartphone is very high, so
you can safely assume that you will get much more positive response from mobile
devices than your website. M-commerce is recommended for every business
irrespective of its type, scale, and size.
