ABSTRACT
With the advancement in technology and the introduction of internet in 1940s, the traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) has transformed to internet-dependent commerce, electronic commerce (e-commerce). E-commerce has enabled users to access services and make transactions from anywhere and anytime. Nowadays e-commerce is moving toward mobile commerce (m-commerce). M-commerce was inculcated as a part of e-commerce in the 1990s. This allowed the users to do commercial activities while they were moving. Although many studies related to m-commerce have existed in literature, they were focused on specific regions or areas or from specific viewpoints. Researchers have distinguished the success factors into critical success factors (firm’s perspective) and customer-oriented success factors (customer’s perspective). It has been proved previously that m-commerce when compared with e-commerce share some similar points but they are not analogous. The major point of difference is the mobility criterion possessed by m-commerce. With over 7.7 billion mobile connections and 4.7 billion unique mobile subscribers in the world, which comes out to be more than the world population, there exists a need to study m-commerce especially from the customers’ perspective. The aim of this chapter is to define the factors 72that affect success of m-commerce from customers’ point of view, evaluate these factors, and rank some predetermined mobile applications on the basis of these factors. Previous studies were centered on finding the system success factors and less work has concentrated toward customer satisfaction. The success of e-commerce firms depends on the perception of online customers toward their website. But since most of the e-commerce firms are extending to m-commerce, the success of these firms depends on the satisfaction that the customers obtain while using the mobile application. This chapter discusses in detail the factors that impact the success of m-commerce. Here, we extend the factors defined by Kabir and Hasin (2011), by adding a criterion, namely, “online customer feedback.” The factor is incorporated so as to take care of the impact of feedbacks on the potential purchasers of that product/service. Also the model proposed in this chapter combines the Multi Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichments Evaluation (PROMETHEE). The AHP is used to obtain the criteria weights through a structured survey and PROMETHEE is used to obtain the final ranking of the m-commerce applications concerned. A numerical illustration is given to show the efficiency of the proposed model. The illustration validated the significance of the two criteria: online customer feedback and personalization. This showed the importance of feedbacks/reviews and personalized products/services among the new-age tech-savvy customers.
