Read Dave Wood’s and Brian Oula’s excellent post on NFC a few days ago (you can see it here). Gripping stuff, and looks like it could finally give m-commerce the push it needs.  However, payment is only one part of the e-commerce jigsaw (although perhaps the last, missing part).  By the way, I find it fascinating that m-commerce has been around for 13 years now.  1997 is when some entrepreneurial Finns rigged a coca-cola vending machine at Helsinki airport to accept payments via SMS.  I remember reading about this and thinking 1) that the age of credit cards was at an end and 2) that Nokia would dominate the world completely within a few years, owning both the handset and financial transactions market.  Clearly, I spent most divination classes thinking about girls instead of listening...

Since then, vast sums of money have changed hand through m-commerce, for example ring-tone payments, banking and buying rail-tickets, but it has not really become a replacement for your wallet or credit cards.  I find this surprising (the opportunity has certainly been there), but once again I make the prediction that things are about to change.  As always, the revolution will be driven by a combination of new technology (e.g. the NFC chip) and social change.  Combined with all other new technology and services being rolled out (location based services, barcode scanning and push notifications) and you can see that the retail experience is about to change quite significantly.  The mobile is set to become the magic wand letting you find the products, learn “everything” about it, select the best place to buy from and then pay for it.  As for the knowledge part, retailers would like to control this by owning the app, but may not be able to. For example, free2work, an organisation working against child labour, provides an app which allows users to check products ethical background in the store.  Add to this that users are likely interested in what other users have said about the product, and you can see that users may feel it’s in their interest to not just take the sellers’ advice on what is best for them

However, it is not at all certain whether apps will rule the world.  Recently I found myself in town with two kids when I suddenly realised one of them needed a new judo outfit.  In the olden days, this would have to wait, but some quick mobile googling later I found myself picking up a fine pair of fighting pajamas.  If there is an app or this, I wasn’t aware of it and would not have spent time downloading it.  The big retailers are quick to catch on to this impulse – and as a consequence may not go for apps, at least not first.  For example, according to Marketing Week, M&S did a mobile optimised website only (no app), as they felt this reduced the need to spend money on developing for multiple handsets.  The rise of HTML5 is offering more “app-like” abilities to web-apps, and according to M&S consumers just want things to work, and are not too fussed whether something is a web or mobile app.  Similarly, Tesco has identified many of their customers as non iPhone/Android users and therefore launched its first transactional app on Nokia phones, before the more “glamorous” launch on iTunes.

The bottom line?  The launch strategy depends on your audience and the likely customer behaviour.  If heavy on iphone / android users who do repeat transactions, go for the app-stores – if reaching a wider market, focused on one-off impulse buys, consider doing “web first”.