Recently in the Mongolian wireless marketplace, many E-commerce companies have been making considerable investments in the technological development of M-commerce, taking competitive advantage of new business possibilities offered by Internet-based wireless technologies. In the Mongolian wireless marketplace, this new mobile environment opens the door for new and exciting market opportunities in mobile services and applications. In the near future, these companies will be looking toward M-commerce services as a supplemental source of revenue in the mobile marketplace.
This paper contains theory that focuses on the basic concepts of the M-commerce environment, its wireless network technologies and its applications infrastructure. This research also details the current status of ICT development in Mongolia and suggests a market hypothesis. Upon searching for references to assist us in establishing a market hypothesis, we discovered that few comprehensive studies on consumer perspective and behavior related to M-commerce services actually exist in the literature.
In the area of M-commerce, many companies neglect the consumer perspective, concentrating only on technological factors only when formulating their market strategies. And, due to technological blindness, many companies were not able to succeed in end-user E-commerce services. Given that fact, this paper formulates a consumer-centric research model. In order to prove the research model, we chose the survey method which allows for the collection of large amounts of data from a sizeable population in a highly economical way. Through the survey, this paper defines consumers' attitudes towards M-commerce services by identifying potential Business-to-Consumer (B2C) applications and its primary target groups in terms of gender and age, and by investigating whether consumers recognize the value proposition of M-commerce applications and services.
As shown in the data analysis and results, this research concludes that M-commerce development in Mongolia is still at its infancy, and that the implementation of M-commerce depends not only on technological process, but also on consumer attitudes and their willingness to adopt M-commerce services. As well, other complex cross-cultural factors--socially, economically, culturally, et cetera--enter strongly into the equation.
