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Sixty-two percent of British companies are still taking a "wait and see" attitude to m-commerce, according to new research released by e-business Expo 2000, Computer Weekly and Compaq.
But almost half of all those surveyed rated m-commerce as either "very or quite important" to their organisation's future success. More than a quarter of those companies who have not yet started to plan for m-commerce said they will do so in the next 12 months.
Among the main reasons given by company bosses for the absence of an m-commerce strategy were that they were concentrating on other areas (31 percent), that they considered m-commerce an unproven technology (20 percent), lack of money (19 percent), skills shortages (18 percent) and a lack of top level support (17 percent).
Those companies who are using mobile technologies appear to be following a similar pattern of adoption as was the case with e-business, according to the survey of almost 500 UK companies, completed over the past six weeks. Some 17 percent currently use m-commerce for information, followed by 11 percent who offer services, nine percent who use it to enable their sales force to work remotely, eight percent who use it to take orders and three percent to accept payments.
There will be a great deal of growth in the m-commerce market, the survey shows, with 22 percent of companies expecting to use WAP as a channel in the future, 11 percent Bluetooth, 11 percent 3G and nine percent GPRS. There will also be a considerable increase in the expected use of PDAs with 14 percent of companies using this as a channel in the future.
It also points towards a healthy business-to-business (B2B) m-market with over 50 percent of respondents hoping to access this market using m-commerce, followed by 38 percent who hope to access the business-to-consumer (B2C) market and 26 percent who see themselves using m-commerce for individual-to-individual purposes.
The greatest benefit m-commerce is seen to bring to an organisation is better customer service (44 percent), followed by gaining competitive advantage (37 percent) and a means of accessing new markets (30 percent).
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