The Global Mobile Commerce Forum, which came to include over 100 organisations, had its fully minuted launch in London on 10 November 1997.
Over 100 companies joined the Forum within a year, many forming mobile commerce teams of their own, e.g. MasterCard and Motorola.
Mobile commerce services were first delivered in 1997, when the first two mobile-phone-enabled Coca-Cola vending machines were installed in the Helsinki area in Finland.
Two major national commercial platforms for mobile commerce were launched in 1999: Smart Money in the Philippines, and NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode Internet service in Japan.
[4] In appointing Mr Hoffman, ETSI quoted industry analysts as predicting "that m-commerce is poised for such an exponential growth over the next few years that could reach US$200 billion by 2004".
[5] As of 2008, UCL Computer Science and Peter J. Bentley demonstrated the potential for medical applications on mobile devices.
[6] PDAs and cellular phones have become so popular that many businesses[specify] are beginning to use mobile commerce as a more efficient way to communicate with their customers.
Perennial early adopters, such as the youth market, which are the least price sensitive, as well as more open to premium mobile content and applications, must also be a key target for device vendors.
[7] More recently, brick and mortar business owners, and big-box retailers in particular, have made an effort to take advantage of mobile commerce by utilizing a number of mobile capabilities such as location-based services, barcode scanning, and push notifications to improve the customer experience of shopping in physical stores.
By mid summer 2013, "omnichannel" retailers (those with significant e-commerce and in-store sales) were seeing between 25% and 30% of traffic to their online properties originating from mobile devices.
The Google Wallet Mobile App[8] launched in September 2011 and the m-Commerce joint venture formed in June 2011 between Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile are recent developments of note.
[10] A recent survey states that 2012, 41% of smartphone customers have purchased retail products with their mobile devices.
Usually, a mobile ATM can be placed in just about any location and can transmit transaction information wirelessly, so there's no need to have a phone line handy.
Additionally, these machines typically have internal heating and air conditioning units that help keep them functional despite the temperature of the environment.ion of mobile money services for the unbanked, operators are now looking for efficient ways to roll out and manage distribution networks that can support cash-in and cash-out.
[12] The Hungarian market is one where direct debits are not standard practice, so the facility eases the burden of queuing for the postpaid half of Vodafone's subscriber base in Hungary.
These services include: Customized traffic information, based on a user's actual travel patterns, can be sent to a mobile device.
This customized data is more useful than a generic traffic-report broadcast but was impractical before the invention of modern mobile devices due to the bandwidth requirements.
Banks and other financial institutions use mobile commerce to allow their customers to access account information and make transactions, such as purchasing stocks, and remitting money.
Payments can be made directly inside an application running on a popular smartphone operating system, such as Google Android.
Analyst firm Gartner expects in-application purchases to drive 41 percent of app store (also referred to as mobile software distribution platforms) revenue in 2016.
The consumer can receive a marketing message or discount coupon and, within a few seconds, make a decision to buy and go on to complete the sale - without disrupting their current real-world activity.
Research demonstrates that consumers of mobile and wireline markets represent two distinct groups who are driven by different values and behaviors, and who exhibit dissimilar psychographic and demographic profiles.
As a result, successful mobile commerce requires the development of marketing campaigns targeted to these particular dimensions and according to user segments.
[19] Consumers can use many forms of payment in mobile commerce, including: Interaction design and UX design has been at the core of the m-commerce experience from its conception, producing apps and mobile web pages that create highly usable interactions for users.
[22] Additionally, shopping for others was a motivator for engaging in m-commerce apps with a great preference for close integration with social media.
[24] Mobile applications serve as a means to ensure positive user experience, seamless interaction, and increased revenues for e-commerce.