Adoption and business value of mobile retail channel: a dependency perspective on mobile commerce

Forrest Research estimated that revenues derived from mobile devices will grow at an annual rate of 39% to reach $31 billion by 2016. With the tremendous market growth, mobile banking, mobile marketing, and mobile retailing have been recently introduced to satisfy customer needs. Academic and practical articles have widely discussed unique features of m-commerce. For instance, hardware constraints such as small screens have led to the discussion of tradeoff between usability and mobility. Needs for personalization and entertainment foster the development of new mobile data services. Given distinct features of mobile data services, existing empirical literature on m-commerce is mostly from the consumer side and focuses on consumer perceptions toward these features and their adoption intentions. From the supply side, limited data availability in early years explains the lack of firm-level studies on m-commerce. Prior studies have shown that unclear market demand is a major reason that hinders firms' adoption of m-commerce. Given the advances of smart phones, especially the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, firms recently have started to incorporate various mobile information systems in their business operations. The study uses mobile retailing as the context and empirically assesses firms' migration to this new sales venue with a unique cross-sectional dataset. Despite the distinct features of m-commerce, m-Retailing is essentially an extended arm of e-Retailing. Thus, a dependency perspective is used to explore the link between a firm's e-Retail characteristics and the migration to m-Retailing. Rooted in the innovation diffusion theory, the first stage of my study assesses the decision of adoption that indicates whether a firm moves to m-Retailing and the extent of adoption that shows a firm's commitment to m-Retailing in terms of system implementation choices. In this first stage, I take a dependency perspective to examine the impacts of e-Retail characteristics on m-Retailing adoption. The second stage of my study analyzes conditions that affect business value of the m-Retail channel. I examine the association between system implementation choices and m-Retail performance while analyzing the effects of e-Retail characteristics on value realization. The two-stage analysis provides an exploratory assessment of firm's migration from e-Retailing to m-Retailing.