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

Although mobile commerce growth shows a promising trend and provides ample potential for retailers around the globe, several studies have shown that m-commerce has so far failed to attract the hearts and minds of potential customers across different countries. Unlike past studies that examine single countries and/or developed markets, 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, U.S., and Pakistan). This four-country context offers a unique opportunity for understanding how m-commerce consumers' behaviors differ across disparate national markets. We propose a conceptual framework linking m-commerce users' behaviors (intentions and actual usages) to its key drivers including ubiquity and habit, and 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 m-commerce readiness 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. We outline how m-retailers operating across different countries—developed and developing—should adapt their marketing strategies to customers at different m-commerce readiness stages.