Over the last couple of years mobile commerce (m-commerce) has been built up and broken down numerous times. Its happening then its not, we have the tools then the infrastructure lets us down and just as we believe that it is possibly possible then consumers feel the credit crunch and credit cards aren’t king anymore.

So where does that leave us now? Is this actually going to happen – are we actually going to be able to make purchases via our cell phones sometime in our lifetime? We are left with quite a positive “possibly maybe.” Its a tough one to call.

So lets look at where we stand. Our telecommunication infrastructure is developing and most of it has become quite stable with 3G available in most major areas of South Africa. David Gould, mShopper’s CEO, says that on average online retailers prices are 20% less than their brick and mortar counterparts, which is very welcome in our current economic climate. Consumers are doing their bit by equipping themselves with the tools needed to shop via their cell phones as the  World Bank statistics show a 70% annual growth in mobile subscriptions since 2005, we also have solid & tested shopping carts( like OSCommerce, Magento & Zen Cart) at our disposal and payment methods too, aren’t limited to credit cards anymore with options like Fundamo, EFT’s and even SMS banking/payments.

This doesn’t mean the end of traditional retailers though, it is just another opportunity. Mr Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner, suggests that retailers should differentiate themselves by “providing multichannel capabilities, such as enabling mobile-phone-generated orders to be picked up in a store or allowing consumers to save mobile-phone-created shopping sessions to be later continued on a Web browser,” [Cellular news.com]

So, it seems that we geared for m-commerce to take on the traditional brick and mortar retail model with everything laying dormant, waiting for the consumer to say “its time!”