M-Commerce
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.
