The essentials of mobile commerce

There are two main ways in which a small business could benefit from mobile commerce (m-commerce). These are detailed below.Selling a product or serviceIf your products or services are information-based and relatively low cost - less than £5 - then you could consider delivery direct to mobile devices, with payment via the micro-payment route. See the page in this guide on micro-payments.If your products or services depend strongly on the physical presence of the customer and a significant amount of that volume could come from "passing trade", then you might consider the opportunities offered by location-based m-commerce.

Improving productivityThere are a much wider range of possibilities for improving productivity, for example:if you have workers who operate away from your offices much of the time, but who need up-to-date information in order to deliver an effective service.

SMS-based system might be extremely usefulif you have mobile workers who are gathering information that is time critical, eg reports, photographs, etc, then the ability to capture that information and transmit it without needing any bulky equipment could be very significant

In considering the potential benefits of m-commerce you should also consider some of the disadvantages:mobile solutions will probably never be as fast as Internet-based systems, so you should consider whether this will be a problem for your businessthe main advantage of a mobile device - its small size - is also a major disadvantage if you need to view large complex diagrams with lots of detailslaptops have much greater storage capacity than mobile phones and PDAs, and - with a good wireless conection - are just as portableSecurity should also be taken into consideration. Mobile devices can be easily lost or stolen. If you are storing sensitive corporate data, it should be encrypted. Passwords should be changed immediately if the device is lost or stolen.