The Role of M-Commerce Readiness in Emerging and Developed Markets

Abstract

Although mobile commerce (m-commerce) growth provides ample potential for retailers around the globe, several studies have shown that it has failed to attract potential customers across different countries. This study advances the literature by comparing m-commerce customers’ behavioral intentions and actual behaviors using data from 812 m-commerce users across four countries (Australia, India, the United States, and Pakistan). This context offers a unique opportunity for understanding how m-commerce consumers’ behaviors differ across disparate national markets. The authors propose a conceptual framework linking m-commerce users’ behaviors (intentions and actual usages) to key drivers (ubiquity and habit), and they develop hypotheses about the moderating roles of m-commerce readiness and habit in these linkages. The results reveal important asymmetries between m-commerce readiness stage and between habit: users at an early m-commerce readiness stage assign more importance to ubiquity relative to habit in influencing purchase intentions, whereas the opposite is true for the users who are at an advanced stage. Habit moderates the influence of ubiquity such that its importance in determining intention decreases as the behavior in question takes a more habitual nature. The authors outline how m-retailers operating across developed and developing countries should adapt their marketing strategies to customers at different m-commerce readiness stages.