Consumer Behavior in the Mobile Environment: An Exploratory Study of M-Commerce and Social Media

Consumer behavior in the omnipresent mobile environment constitutes a challenge for m-commerce vendors, as they seek to understand factors that affect it, positively and negatively, and to integrate social media in their mobile strategy. This paper presents an exploratory qualitative study about the use of smartphones and social media, in the context of m-commerce. The authors' objective is to facilitate the understanding of consumers' perceptions and behavior in m-commerce and social media and explore the potential of social media for m-commerce purposes. The results of their qualitative analysis show that reputation, design aspects, such as ease of use, as well as privacy and security are important factors for m-commerce and social media adoption and use. Their qualitative results also reveal factors having a negative effect to m-commerce. Business opportunities enabled by social media for m-commerce and how these can be leveraged in this promising mobile context are also discussed.