The Quest for Convenient Communication

An interesting statistic from a recent Forrester research study predicts that by the year 2004 B2C sales in the United States will reach a staggering 3.2 trillion dollars! (see Table 2.1).

There’s no doubt that online shopping has hit big and is only expected to g row dramatically over the next few years. Those same services are extending into the realm of mobility, as consumers are demanding and obtaining quicker and easier ways of accessing the Internet. As Table 2.2 indicates, the demand for the wireless Internet is also growing exponentially.

Without a doubt, there are many factors that play into the demand for mobility. Consumers today are presented with countless ways of leveraging technology in living their daily lives. Mobility has offered another avenue for consumers not just to purchase goods and services online, but also to conveniently make those purchases on the go, anywhere, at anytime. As Table 2.3 indicates, consumers throughout the world are adopting this method of commerce. Let’s not stop there; mobility is offering services that could never exist in a wired world, such as E911 and mobile wallets. Soon, it might not be necessary to carry paper money, because electronic money can be made available on smart cards or through electronic wallets that go with you everywhere. Regardless of the popularity of these mobile services, certain challenges seem come up time and time again that drive a consumers decision to go mobile (see Table 2.4).

Those challenges include:

• Security. We all remember the first time we made an online purchase using our credit card. After you bought your product online you were probably immediately asking yourself questions such as “Did my credit card number make it through?” or “Were there any prying eyes that grabbed my credit card information?” or better yet, “Will I ever get the item that I ordered?” Having the comfort of knowing that personal financial information is safe from hackers is one of the biggest concerns today. According to the Nation Consumers League, the amount of money consumers lost in consumer fraud in 2002 was over 14 million dollars, with more than 13 million from online auctions alone. “The average loss per person rose from $411 in 2001 to $484 in 2002.” With those kinds of statistics, it’s easy to see why security is high on the list of concerns that consumers are facing when on buying or browsing on the Net. Suffice it to say that there is a great deal of measures being taken by organizations to make the wireless online buying experience a safe and secure method of shopping. Some of those methods include cryptography through confidentiality applications, server and client authentication, digital signatures, public key encryption, and digital certificates. For more information on security in a mobile environment, see the book The CGE&Y Guide to Wireless Enterprise Application Architecture by Adam Kornak and John Distefano (John Wiley & Sons, Nov. 2001).

Taken From : Enterprise Guide to Gaining Business Value from Mobile Technologies