Opinion

From E-Commerce to M-Commerce

Henry D Tran, Department of Marketing, David Nazarian College of Business and Economics, California State University Northridge, USA.

Received Date: June 26, 2020;  Published Date: July 09, 2020

Today’s e-commerce is the concept of online business transactions. Twenty years ago, the consumer trust level of an online shopping concept was not there helped in part by the massive dot-com failure. This was a new perception, perhaps a novelty that the Generation X and Baby Boomers were not ready to assimilate. The platform of e-commerce has not changed. The demographics have. Millennials have grown up and their electronic mindset has simply adapted to the methodology. Research and analysis show that e-commerce acceptance is based on personality traits and attributes [2]. According to Kotler P, et al. [3] consumers’ purchasing decisions are based on different factors: Cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors. These factors lead to a variety of views of basic values, word-of-mouth influence, lifestyle, perception, and motivation. Millennials have a psychographic effect on e-commerce for the simplicity of the price-consciousness [4]. The goal of an e-commerce is to entice them and influence their purchasing decisions.

Amazon’s long-term objective was to be the e-tailor that would sell everything under the sun. Being one of the few survivors of the dot-com era at the turn of the millennium, Amazon knew the limits of online retailing depended on the consumers’ trust code. Fundamentally, if they did not trust the system, the whole e-commerce theory would not have survived. Amazon’s success derived from its gradual move into the web evolution. Founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of his book business was to wage competition against Barnes and Nobles which was struggling in the ‘90s due its fast expansion of stores across the country [5]. The consumers during the dot-com run were primarily from Generation X, which was on the brink of transitioning to the new technology age. The X-ers did not fully develop a trust in the new e-commerce age; hence the bust of the dot-com novelty exploded. One key reason was that the dotcom companies did not have sufficient data on the consumers to establish a successful theory of e-commerce. When the Millennials reached adulthood was around the time of the resurrection of the e-commerce. Being native digitalers, the Millennial market fit into the Amazon’s e-commerce strategies. Amazon rose from being a book and music seller to become an everything store. A 2019 study from Digital Commerce 360 showed that 60% of e-commerce consumers were Millennials, and 36% were from mobile devices. The era of m-commerce began.

M-Commerce was born in the late ‘90s but consumers did not fully accept the concept until almost two decades later. Slower technology and security were the two main barriers to the consumers’ consent of m-commerce [6]. In 2018, m-commerce was strongly adopted, and gained over $600 billion in global spending [7]. Companies today face more competitive pressure to develop a strong e-commerce in their marketing strategic plans as global smartphone users are expected to reach 2.87 billion [1]. Meanwhile Millennials are a major market segment and the top smartphone users since 2016 according to the Nielsen Company studies [8]. Companies’ marketing plans must be shifted to innovation, to keep up with this generation which took a serious restructuring of the economy. With a much stronger technology of network, m-commerce could be a top consuming channel and must have its own strategic plan. It can no longer be viewed as the little cousin of e-commerce.

Mobile marketing was born to segment the Millennials’ movement through the m-commerce principle. Over half of the consumers made up of Millennials, therefore the emerging tool of E-Marketing leveraged itself through the studying and examining of their behaviors. E-consumers build their loyalty on product research, review, and price comparison. A successful marketing plan today must be innovated and accommodated. Millennials are less homogenous than the previous generation, but they share the same characteristics of consuming. Fundamentally the companies must translate their traditional marketing to mobile marketing as their roles of customer interaction have changed to one a virtuality. The recent COVID-19 lockdown has shown that companies with an established m-commerce plan are able to sustain its business status.

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