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Introduction to the Special Issue Mobile Commerce: The Past, Present, and
Future of Mobile Commerce Research

Article  in  International Journal of Electronic Commerce · July 2012

DOI: 10.2753/JEC1086-4415160401

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 Introduction to the Special Issue on Mobile
Commerce: The Past, Present, and Future of
Mobile Commerce Research
Panos E. Kourouthanassis and George M. Giaglis, Guest Editors

ABSTRACT: Research on mobile commerce has attracted the interest of e-commerce

scholars ever since mobile and portable devices became a widespread and effective
means of commercial transactions and business practices. In the present editorial of this
special issue of IJEC, we first revisit the past of m-commerce practice and research through
an analysis of m-commerce-related publications and prevailing business models from
2000 to 2011. The analysis points to the increasingly topical and maturing status of the
field, as well as to a gradual move from engineering-driven to socioeconomic-focused
research. We then move to examine the field’s present, by examining the submissions to
this special issue and the five accepted papers that appear herein. This discussion pro-
vides a glimpse into the questions on m-commerce researchers’ minds today; however,
it also allows us to investigate what lies ahead in the future of m-commerce research as
we move toward the more social-minded, hyperconnected world of tomorrow’s social
commerce (s-commerce).

A Brief History of M-Commerce Practice: Closed as the New

Open <<Au: The subheading seems unclear; perhaps
something like “Laying the Groundwork for …”
??? See also note after last sentence before your
callout for Figure 1 and Table 1, next page.>>

Mobile commerce (m-commerce), as a form of e-commerce conducted over

mobile or wireless networks [12, 13], is arguably very different from its more
traditional, desktop computer–based predecessor. Inasmuch as m-commerce
services are accessible on the move through devices (such as smartphones and
tablets) with fundamentally different presentation, processing, and interaction
modalities compared to a desktop computer, such services enable a whole new
set of unprecedented service capabilities, including location awareness, con-
text sensing, and push delivery. Unsurprisingly, such features have sparked
wholly new service categories, such as location-based [5, 19] and context-aware
services [4, 14], and have generated immense interest in academia and industry
alike as to the research challenges and innovation opportunities associated
with them.
The history of m-commerce practice to date can be studied through the lens
of the competitive dynamics of the mobile marketspace. As with any phenom-
enon that has impacted the lives of so many people in such a profound way,
the mobile revolution has attracted the interest of many heavyweight players
that have rendered today’s market, not just hypercompetitive, but literally the
battleground for the information and communications technology (ICT) mar-
ket’s giants. This battle is still ongoing and can be summarized in a three-era
trajectory (see Table 1) from closed (“walled garden”) to open-ended solutions

International Journal of Electronic Commerce / Summer 2012, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 5–17.
Copyright © 2012 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
1086-4415/2012 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/JEC1086-4415160401

01 guest intro.indd 5 5/9/2012 11:16:37 AM

 6 Kourouthanassis and Giaglis

Table 1. The Three Eras of M-Commerce.

Era Major milestones

Era 1: M-portals 1997: WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) Forum is formed

(from ca. 1997) 1999 (February): NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode launch in Japan
1999 (December): Vodafone Live! launch in Japan (as J-Sky)
Era 2: M-internet (from 2000: Ericsson R380 Smartphone (the first device to use the Symbian OS)
ca. 2000) 2000: Opera Mobile (the first commercial microbrowser)
2001: Mobile Explorer 3.0
Era 3: M-apps (from ca. 2007: Apple iPhone launch (June)
2007) 2008: Apple’s App Store launch (July)
2008: Google’s Android market launch (October)

Figure 1. M-Commerce Eras: From Closed to Open to Closed Again

and back, as shown in Figure 1. <<Changes ok? Table 1 doesn’t seem

to reflect closed and open aspects>>
During the first era (from circa 1997), mobile network operators (MNOs),
such as NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Vodafone in Europe, and Verizon Wireless in
the United States, experimented with providing m-commerce services to their
customers, bundled into mobile portals [2]. M-portals became the first means of
packaging and delivering mobile applications to end users and were typically
built around thematic application categories, such as infotainment (weather
info or ringtone downloads), location-based services (e.g., nearby restaurants),
and online transactions (such as hotel reservations). Although m-portals were
heavily promoted by operators, their adoption never really took off (save in a
few Asian countries), perhaps as a result of their closed nature (walled-garden

01 guest intro.indd 6 5/9/2012 11:16:38 AM

 International journal of electronic commerce 7

approach), which ran contrary to the Internet’s openness and user control culture
[7, 18]. Their market failure with customers deprived operators of incentives
to further develop them, thus rendering m-portals even less valuable to users
over time. This vicious circle essentially led to their withdrawal from today’s
m-commerce market.
Then, technological advances, such as the high speeds afforded by 3G
mobile broadband, coupled with the gradual retreat of the mobile operators
from the center stage of m-commerce business models and the emergence of
Internet-capable smartphones, gave rise to a second era of m-commerce (from
circa 2000), with users enjoying direct Internet access through their mobile
devices. Thus, m-Internet business models emerged and obliged traditional
e-commerce providers to tailor their Web sites’ design, interaction, and func-
tionality to the capabilities of mobile devices [1] so as to have their offerings
available through m-commerce as well. The successful introduction of the first
genuine (i.e., not originating from e-commerce) m-commerce offerings, such
as location-based services, coupled with the fast proliferation of smartphones
and microbrowsers around the world, drew the first sizable audiences of in-
novators (in marketing terms) to the m-commerce world and rapidly expanded
the value of the m-commerce market.
This, however, naturally also drew in the largest players in the ICT market,
who, seeing a tremendous market opportunity, started competing furiously
in the open m-commerce market. Companies such as Apple (iPhone, iPad,
iTunes), Google (Android), Microsoft (Windows Phone), and others developed
device and platform innovations that managed to capture large audiences in
various forms of, mostly closed-ended, mobile applications (m-apps) in what
can be termed the third era of m-commerce (circa 2007 to date). Such business
models popularized manufacturer-hosted third-party application distribu-
tion to combine the freedom of choice afforded by the open mobile Internet
with the network effect benefits of proprietary innovations to allow users to
discover, download, or purchase mobile applications, thereby creating a new
m-commerce ecosystem [9]. The huge audiences drawn to such m-apps have
in turn attracted similarly large groups of developers who compete to provide
the best offerings, thereby creating a large pool of m-apps that in turn draws in
even more customers. This “virtuous” circle has contributed to a huge market
success, with the value of the m-commerce market expected to reach $31 bil-
lion in the United States alone by 2016, a figure that accounts for 7 percent of
online retail and 1 percent of total retail [11].

A Brief History of M-Commerce Research:

Toward Maturity and Independence

Literature analyses of m-commerce research are scarce. One such seminal

study, by Ngai and Gunasekaran [13], analyzed 149 articles from 73 journals
between 2000 and 2003 to classify m-commerce literature in five dimensions:
mobile commerce theory and research; wireless network infrastructure; mobile middle-
ware; wireless user infrastructure; and mobile cases and applications. Similarly,
Fouskas et al. [6] developed a road map of m-commerce research based on

01 guest intro.indd 7 5/9/2012 11:16:38 AM

 8 Kourouthanassis and Giaglis

an analysis of published sources and empirical work. The road map classifies
m-commerce research into four dimensions, namely, technology (infrastructure
and devices), service (applications, content, payments), value (business models,
users/workers), and enablers (security and privacy, policy, and regulation).
Further, the authors used the results of surveys and workshops to synthesize
and prioritize short-, medium-, and long-term research challenges in each of
these dimensions.
We are aware of no other studies that have taken a holistic view to analyzing
m-commerce research, but there are works that have taken a narrower stance
to examine particular m-commerce dimensions, for example, mobile payments
[3], context-aware systems [8], and mobile marketing and advertising [15,
16]. Hence, we set out to investigate how research in the field has matured in
the years since the aforementioned publications and how this maturity cor-
responds to the actual dynamics of m-commerce practice discussed earlier.
We performed an analysis of m-commerce-related journal articles from
2000 to 2011 by querying Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science database with
the terms mobile, wireless, pervasive, and ubiquitous. We included the latter two
terms because pervasive and ubiquitous information systems represent the
next step of mobile computing systems and share significant similarities [10].
We narrowed our results to articles that have been published in top informa-
tion systems (IS) and e-commerce journals, excluding engineering-oriented
sources, such as IEEE transactions journals. All references were exported into
an Endnote database, including the following data: year of publication, authors,
article title, journal, abstract, and keywords.
We first computed the distribution of published articles per source and
per year. Then, we classified each article under the five axes of the Ngai and
Gunasekaran framework. Based on this, we report a trajectory of the pub-
lished m-commerce research and we discuss avenues for further research in
the field.

Journals Publishing M-Commerce Research

Our search yielded 1,031 articles from 41 journals (see Table 2). Almost a quar-
ter of the articles (22.4 percent) were published in two journals, namely, the
International Journal of Mobile Communications and Telecommunications Policy.
This is unsurprising considering the scope of both journals (IJMC focuses on
mobile communications, and TP is concerned with policy, regulation, and
governance issues of telecommunications systems).
It is interesting to note that some of the top IS journals (e.g., Information
Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly,
and Journal of the Association for Information Systems) are low on the list, having
published only a few articles related to m-commerce. This may be somewhat
expected considering the high publication lead time of these journals and the
narrow focus of m-commerce against the entirety of the IS research field. Still,
it is notable how the practical significance of the m-commerce market diverges
from the interest that seems to be paid to the field by researchers and top
journals, despite the potential of the field to inspire the development of new

01 guest intro.indd 8 5/9/2012 11:16:38 AM

 International journal of electronic commerce 9

Table 2. Distribution of Articles per IS Journal.

Number of
Journal articles

International Journal of Mobile Communications 115

Telecommunications Policy 115
Expert Systems with Applications 90
Communications of the ACM 82
IEEE Computer 71
Computer Journal 64
Information Sciences 63
IEEE Internet Computing 46
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 34
Behaviour and Information Technology 31
Decision Support Systems 31
Information Systems Frontiers 30
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 27
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 25
Interacting with Computers 22
Information Processing Letters 17
Industrial Management and Data Systems 15
Information & Management 14
Journal of Information Technology 12
Journal of Computer Information Systems 11
European Journal of Information Systems 10
International Journal of Electronic Commerce 10
International Journal of Information Management 9
Computers in Industry 8
Internet Research 8
Journal of Strategic Information Systems 8
Human-Computer Interaction 7
Government Information Quarterly 6
Information Systems Management 6
ACM Computing Surveys 5
IEEE Software 5
Information Systems 5
Journal of Information Science 5
Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce 5
IBM Systems Journal 4
Information Systems Journal 4
Journal of Management Information Systems 3
Journal of the Association for Information Systems 3
Information Systems Research 2
MIS Quarterly 2
Information Technology & Management 1
Total 1,031

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 10 Kourouthanassis and Giaglis

Figure 2. Distribution of M-Commerce Publications

theories and models in several areas of IS research, such as design science, user
adoption, decision making, and strategy formulation. Interestingly, in 2012,
MIS Quarterly published a large-scale study of mobile Internet consumers
in which Venkatesh et al. [17] refined their unified theory of acceptance and
use of technology (UTAUT) to include three additional constructs: hedonic
motivation, price value, and habit.

M-Commerce Publications over Time

The biennial distribution of m-commerce articles between 2000 and 2011 is

shown in Figure 2.
The first observation that can be made is that m-commerce research is growing
and maturing, as attested by the increasing number of publications per two-
year period, coupled with a natural diminishing rate of increase over time.
At the same time, the constantly increasing number of papers is a sign that
m-commerce research does not show signs of saturation.

M-Commerce Research Themes

We classified all articles in our database according to Ngai and Gunaseka-

ran’s m-commerce framework. Although we acknowledge that some articles
naturally deal with multiple dimensions of m-commerce, and hence could be
classified under more than one dimension, we allocated each article to only the
dimension it addresses according to our own interpretation. We followed Ngai
and Gunasekaran’s themes under each dimension to classify the articles.

• Cases and Applications includes m-commerce case studies, applica-

tions, and services in a specific sector or context.

01 guest intro.indd 10 5/9/2012 11:16:39 AM

 International journal of electronic commerce 11

Figure 3. Distribution of M-Commerce Research Themes

• Network Infrastructure includes articles discussing mobile and wire-

less network specifications and improvements.
• Middleware includes software implementations supporting the opera-
tion and performance of m-commerce applications and services,
such as mobile agents, data handling and management systems, as
well as papers dealing with security and privacy in m-commerce
transactions.
• User Infrastructure includes studies related to the development of mo-
bile interfaces and mobile devices.
• Theory and Research includes m-commerce application development
guidelines; behavioral issues; and economics, strategy, and busi-
ness models for m-commerce. This dimension also includes position
papers (27 in total).

The results of this analysis are illustrated in Figure 3.

The majority of m-commerce papers (413 articles, or 41 percent of the
total) discuss behavior and adoption studies, business models, economics,
and strategy formulation for m-commerce, as well as software engineering
methods and approaches for designing and developing m-commerce ap-
plications. An in-depth analysis of these articles reveals that 188 papers are
adoption studies (18.2 percent of the total volume of published articles), and
119 papers discuss strategy and market issues of m-commerce (11.5 percent
of total publications). Based on this, we can distinguish two strong themes in
m-commerce research: adoption and diffusion of mobile applications and busi-
ness model and strategy formulation.
Middleware for m-commerce (such as mobile agents, database manage-
ment systems, mobile middleware systems, and implementations for security
and privacy in m-commerce) come second with 202 total published articles
(19.6 percent of total publications), followed by Cases and Applications (172

01 guest intro.indd 11 5/9/2012 11:16:40 AM

 12 Kourouthanassis and Giaglis

Figure 4. Evolution of Research Themes in M-Commerce

articles, or 16.7 percent of the total), Network Infrastructure (125 articles, 12.1
percent), and User Infrastructure (103 articles, 10.1 percent).

Evolution of M-Commerce Research Themes

The focus of m-commerce scholars on behavioral studies and m-commerce

economics and strategy is also evinced in the evolution of m-commerce re-
search themes over the years. Figure 4 displays the evolution of m-commerce
subjects over the period 2000–11. Although publications categorized under
all other dimensions show a similar rate of change over time, those under
Theory and Research exhibit much more aggressive growth, especially during
2006–9. This growth should be primarily attributed to the large number of be-
havioral and adoption studies and papers discussing strategy and economics
of m-commerce. Indeed, these two subjects dominate the Theory and Research
dimension after 2004–5 with an escalating representation against other articles
in the same dimension that ranges from 59 percent in 2004–5 to 89 percent in
2010–11. Our analysis also reveals that adoption and behavior studies seem to
be the preferred research subject of m-commerce theorists. In fact, behavior and
adoption studies start to significantly outnumber research papers investigat-
ing strategy and economics issues on m-business after 2006–7. Interestingly,

01 guest intro.indd 12 5/9/2012 11:16:41 AM

 International journal of electronic commerce 13

in the early days of m-commerce research, strategy and economics was the
preferred subject of m-commerce theorists.

The Present of M-Commerce Research:

Special Issue Analysis

This special issue originated from ideas and discussions that took place during
the Ninth International Conference on Mobile Business (ICMB 2010), which
was jointly organized with the Ninth Global Mobility Roundtable (GMR 2010)
in Athens, Greece, in June 2010. IJEC’s editor-in-chief agreed with the confer-
ence organizers (the guest editors of this special issue) on the transformational
nature of m-commerce practice and the significant challenges it poses for
research in the area, and approved this special issue as an outlet where state-
of-the-art research on m-commerce would be presented to provide an overview
of the current status and future prospects of the field. Proving the significant
interest of researchers in the area, the call for papers for this special issue in
September 2010 attracted 60 submissions, which were reviewed in a double-
round, double-blind review cycle. In the first round, the guest editors with
external reviewers short-listed 21 papers, which were then further reviewed
with the help of a team of 30 external reviewers. We would like to thank all
the authors who submitted their work to this special issue, all the reviewers
of both rounds for their hard work and constructive comments, and IJEC’s
editor-in-chief for his continuous support and enthusiasm—their contribution
to the quality of this special issue cannot be stressed enough.
In line with the m-commerce publication patterns presented in the previous
section, the majority of initial submissions were behavior and adoption studies.
Specifically, almost half of the submissions (29 articles in total) discussed vari-
ous types of adoption models in several application fields, including mobile
banking, mobile entertainment services, mobile video, and others.
Business model and economics issues also had a strong presence in the
special issue submissions. Nine submitted articles investigated all aspects of
the mobile ecosystem—from firm performance to m-commerce value chain
orchestration and service distribution models. Interestingly, two articles
discussed the emergence and growth of app stores and explored how these
platforms affect the strategy of m-commerce value chain actors.
We also received four papers presenting the architecture and results of
m-commerce applications and cases in fields such as parking, exhibits man-
agement, and learning. Likewise, we received three submissions discussing
software implementations supporting data management for location-based
services, personalized workforce communications, and analysis of user reviews
to evaluate mobile apps.
The remaining fifteen submissions were distributed to taxonomies and lit-
erature reviews of m-commerce (three articles), models investigating the social
dimension of m-commerce (social networks and word-of-mouth effects—four
articles), development of research instruments and design and evaluation
frameworks of m-commerce applications and technologies (three articles),
segmentation and user modeling studies (three articles), one study on mobile

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 14 Kourouthanassis and Giaglis

advertising, and one study on the impact of m-commerce-generated stress on

job stress and productivity.
The papers accepted to appear in this special issue examine several topi-
cal issues of m-commerce. The first paper, titled “Creating a Taxonomy for
Mobile Commerce Innovations Using Social Network and Cluster Analyses,”
by Lara Khansa, Christopher W. Zobel, and Guillermo Goicochea, presents
the results of a text analysis on over 2,300 m-commerce-related patents. The
authors employ social network analysis and cluster analysis to identify the
evolution of m-commerce innovations over the years. This research paves the
ground for m-commerce scholars to investigate the degree to which research
meets practice and business innovation.
The second paper, “Disclosure Intention of Location-Related Information
in Location-Based Social Network Services,” by Ling Zhao, Yaobin Lu, and
Sumeet Gupta, explores the relationship between privacy concerns in mobile
social network communities and the intention of users to disclose personal
information. The study on a sample of 368 users of location-based social net-
work services reveals the negative effects of privacy concerns on individuals’
intention to disclose location-related information when using such services.
Moreover, both the personalization of the service based on individuals’ loca-
tion and the perception of connectedness by social network users are shown to
influence individuals’ intention to disclose personal information when using
mobile social network services.
The third paper, by Shintaro Okazaki, María Ángeles Navarro-Bailón, and
Francisco-Jose Molina-Castillo, is titled “Privacy Concerns in Quick Response
Code Mobile Promotion: The Role of Social Anxiety and Situational Involve-
ment.” It explores the moderating effect of social anxiety and situational in-
volvement on individuals’ information privacy concerns, defensive responses,
and loyalty during their interactions with mobile promotions based on quick
response (QR) codes. The authors organized an experimental design with the
participation of 667 consumers in Japan. The study findings suggest that situ-
ational involvement acts indeed as a moderator on the dependent variables.
Social anxiety has a moderating effect on individuals’ intention to protect or
fabricate personal information during mobile promotion interactions.
In the fourth paper, “A New Open Door: The Smartphone’s Impact on Work-
to-Life Conflict, Stress, and Resistance,” Haejung Yun, William J. Kettinger,
and Choong C. Lee discuss the effect of smartphones on employee well-being
due to the creation of work-life conflicts and job stress. The results of a study
on 300 smartphone users reveal that two unique benefits of use, namely, flex-
ibility and productivity, have an effect on perceived work overload. However,
the study does not report a direct impact of these benefits on work-to-life
conflict. At the same time, work-to-life conflict has a direct effect on perceived
job stress and enhances employees’ resistance toward using their devices for
work-related tasks.
The final paper of the special issue, titled “Consumer Motivations in Brows-
ing Online Stores with Mobile Devices,” by Akinori Ono, Azusa Nakamura,
Ayako Okuno, and Masayoshi Sumikawa, explores the differences in individu-
als’ browsing behavior between physical and mobile retail stores<<explores
the effects of consumer motivations on browsing online

01 guest intro.indd 14 5/9/2012 11:16:42 AM

 International journal of electronic commerce 15

stores with mobile devices and compares them with the

effects of consumer motivations on browsing physical
stores [first sentence of Abstract]?>>. The paper develops a
consumer motivation model for browsing retail stores based on six motivation
predictors: value, role, adventure, social, gratification, and idea motivation. A
study on 1,406 consumers of physical and mobile retail stores indicates that
consumers’ intention toward browsing physical stores is affected positively
by idea motivation and gratification motivation, but it is negatively influenced
by social motivation.
Likewise, intention toward browsing mobile-based online stores is affected
positively by idea motivation, adventure motivation, and value motivation,
but it is negatively influenced by social motivation.

The Future of M-Commerce Research: Some Thoughts

In 2011, combined shipments of mobile phones and tablets overtook those of

personal computers for the first time. This marks a turning point in the world
of technology in general, but also in the world of e-commerce in particular: as
we move toward a more hyperconnected world of ubiquitous personal tech-
nology, m-commerce is poised to become an even more profound economic
and social phenomenon.
The proliferation of smart portable devices causes and at the same time
reflects changes in society: as people rely more heavily on the Internet for
everything from shopping to social networking, they need continuous access
to it while on the move. This will undoubtedly cause the demand for per-
sonal technology and m-commerce to increase and is bound to have certain
consequences for our lives, such as blurring the boundaries between our per-
sonal and work time. The world of research cannot but follow such ongoing
developments, as evidenced by the trajectory of m-commerce research and
the contents of this special issue. M-commerce researchers will continue to
study such emerging phenomena to help us build better technologies, deliver
innovation, and make sense of a fast-changing world.
The mobile revolution is also reshaping the IT industry: because innova-
tion in the third era of m-commerce (m-apps) is currently dependent on the
competitive dynamics and interplay of a few dominant players (mostly device
manufacturers and platform developers), few can predict what lies ahead
as far as the supply side of the m-commerce market will look like in a few
years. Research into m-commerce business models is fast becoming central to
the field and is expected to form a central dimension of future m-commerce
research. The same applies to research concerned with theorizing about the
design, use, and even aesthetic aspects of m-commerce as a maturing and
newly independent field of research.
Finally, one cannot underestimate the social future of m-commerce. Various
forms of social media (social network platforms, microblogging applications,
and so on) have rightfully grasped the attention of researchers and practitioners
alike. With more than 425 million people accessing Facebook over a mobile
phone at the end of 2011 (more than 50 percent of its total users for the first

01 guest intro.indd 15 5/9/2012 11:16:42 AM

 16 Kourouthanassis and Giaglis

time), the worlds of mobile commerce and social commerce (s-commerce)

are bound to become even more intertwined. Research on how mobility and
social connectivity combine to produce new knowledge, business practices,
and social implications is likely to become the fourth era of m-commerce in
the near future.

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Panos Kourouthanassis (pkour@ionio.gr) is an assistant professor at the Ionian

University, Corfu, Greece. His main research interests lie in the areas of pervasive and
ubiquitous information systems; mobile and electronic commerce; information systems
evaluation; and information systems design. He has published more than 40 papers in
international journals, edited volumes, and proceedings of international conferences,
including the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Journal
of Information Technology, and IEEE Pervasive Computing. He is also coeditor of Pervasive
Information Systems, volume 10 of Advances in Management Information Systems.

George Giaglis (giaglis@aueb.gr) is a professor of e‑business at the Athens Univer-

sity of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece. His main research interests lie in the
areas of mobile and wireless applications and services; ubiquitous and pervasive infor-
mation systems; business process modeling and simulation; and information systems
evaluation. He has published more than 120 papers in leading journals and proceed-
ings of international conferences, including Information Systems Journal, International
Journal of Electronic Commerce, and International Journal of Information Management. He
has authored or edited 12 books and research volumes. He is a member of the edito-
rial board of seven journals, including International Journal of Mobile Communications
and Business Process Management Journal. Since 2001, he has been the director of the
ISTLab Wireless Research Center, a group pursuing research on mobile business and
ubiquitous commerce.

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