M-tailing Among the Young: Exploring Their Intentions to Shop by Mobile Phone

Abstract

These days we can do many things with mobile phones, which probably explains why consumers have adopted mobile devices faster than any other consumer product. In Australia, most households have a mobile phone and it is the young who own and use them most. In a year or two, there will be more mobiles than PCs and they will be as common as TV sets. But what might they be used for? Will m-commerce revolutionise retailing or be a failure? Such speculation led us to investigate intentions to use mobile phones for shopping among university students using a web-based survey. We tested a series of hypotheses based on the literature on non-store purchase environments and data were analysed using stepwise discriminant analysis. We found that owners of mobile phones, who have a high intention to use them for shopping, are more experienced with other non-store purchase environments and have a low concern for online fraud and privacy risk than those with a low intention to m-shop. Limitations, implications, and further research are discussed.