July 21st: Join Impact Mobile in San Francisco to launch the MEF Mobile Commerce Guide.
MEF Americas has produced a Mobile Commerce Guide to help brands, content producers and retailers better understand how to leverage the mobile phone to drive customer acquisition, retention and most importantly conversion. The guide will be divided into sections to address various aspects of M-Commerce, detailing best practices, benefits, standards and case studies.
Vision and Scope
Mobile commerce (M-Commerce) is built on several key technologies. Some are very well established, others are much newer and less common. Traditional means of consumers paying for content and the use of the mobile for paying for services is changing. The market is demanding leadership in Mobile Commerce. The recession, advances in mobile banking and rumblings of NFC are all raising interest in M-commerce.
MEF Americas is launching an M-Commerce initiative, phase one of which will be exploratory. The goal of phase one will be to produce an M-Commerce handbook written through consultation with leading industry players.
What does the Guide Cover?
The worldwide mobile commerce (m-commerce) market place is growing rapidly, enabled by an increasing use of micro-payments. While network operators are still the main payment processor, third-party systems are being made available that can also process mobile payment (including micro payments).
The combination of these services makes it feasible for businesses to handle an extremely large volume of low value sales without needing an extensive chain of retail locations. In addition to purchases like ringtones, music tracks and games, the growth in micro-payments has come from the purchase of items like car parking and cinema tickets. The next major area of growth is anticipated to be in vending machines, where a vast reduction in the need to use and handle coins would bring large benefits.