Enhancement of e-commerce via mobile accesses to the Internet

The potential of the Internet has been expanded substantially by a new generation of mobile devices, opening the door for rapid growth of m-commerce. While the traditional PC access to the Internet continues to be vital for exploiting the advantages of the Internet, the mobile access appears to attract more people because of flexible accesses to the Internet in a ubiquitous manner. Accordingly, e-commerce is now in the process of being converted into m-commerce. The purpose of this paper is to develop and analyze a mathematical model for comparing e-commerce via the traditional PC access only with m-commerce which accommodates both the traditional PC access and the mobile access. The distribution of the number of products purchased by time t and the distribution of the time required for selling K products are derived explicitly, enabling one to assess the impact of mobile devices on e-businesses. Numerical examples are given for illustrating behavioral differences between m-commerce consumers and traditional e-commerce consumers. (C) 2009 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.