Mobile Price Comparison Services

Transcription

1

2 Mobile Price Comparison Services Tobias Brüggemann, Michael H. Breitner Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik der Universität Hannover {brueggemann, Abstract Price comparison services are becoming more and more important. Besides their use in Electronic Commerce today, they will also provide prices for local retail shops in the near future. More than 200 services are online worldwide. But today only few services can be comfortably used on small devices such as PDAs, smartphones and cellulars via SMS, WAP, imode, GPRS/UMTS or WLANs. As a result of unique web pages provided by these services or microbrowsers on small devices full functionality, easy personalization, secure payment and location based services are available. Despite broad mobile supply of German-speaking price comparison services, till now, mobile price comparison could not become widely accepted yet. This paper addresses the state of art concerning Mobile Price Comparison Services. It presents various limiting factors, and outlines what needs to be done to get mass acceptance of mobile price comparison services. 1. Introduction With the beginning of the economic use of the internet the vision of a perfect market was described by many economists. As a result of the simple and economical access to price information by all market participants, the 1990s seemed to be the beginning of an efficient market with perfect competition. Till now, as consequence of this, a general decrease of the price level has only partly been confirmed, however. A far-reaching and enduring price has not occurred in many areas [5]. Occasional heavy discounts and discount actions have been observed since the abolition of the discount law and the German Zugabeverordnung in mid 2001, but consumers still face high price dispersion both in the stationary retail commerce and in the electronic commerce area. The importance of price comparisons on the internet is confirmed by a representative survey by the research group Wahlen Online [7]. According to this 67 per cent of the people asked in the 4th quarter of 2004 with internet access use the internet for price comparisons and only 54 per cent purchase via the internet. Price Comparison Shopping Online Banking Retrieval of Stock Market and Economy Messages Retrieval of Political Messages Insurances Online Brokerage 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% Figure 1. Purpose of Internet Use [7] 4th quarter th quarter 2004 The price isn't the only criterion for consumers to find a good supplier of a desired product. Transportation costs and conditions, availability, liability conditions, reliability of the dealer and its service and support, for example, play an essential role besides the plain retail price. Price comparison services which appear as an information intermediary between consumers and suppliers can offer valuable help by choosing suppliers. It is comfortably possible for their users to compare offers of many suppliers more comprehensively and find reasonable offers within a short period of time. A Biz- Rate study mid 2003 illustrates that already 17% of online buyers start their product search on home pages of price comparison services. 47% of the users start their search on so-called "aggregator sites" which include purchase portals, search engines and auctioneers. In contrast to this there were only 30% in the year 2001 [9]. In the meantime more than 200 suppliers of automated price comparisons have been successfully established worldwide. Also specialized price comparisons for mobile devices, cellulars and smartphones are offered meanwhile. Price comparisons are therefore also possible before unpremeditated shopping in the stationary retail commerce. The examination of enormous potentials for all stakeholders involved in the mobile price comparison against the background of current restraints is the focus of this contribution. At first the basic principals of price comparison services will be explained. Adding on to that, suitable small mobile devices will be introduced and today s available mobile supply of price comparison services will be examined in the next step.

3 simple form of personalization is till now merely offered by the supplier PerfectPrice GmbH at the price comparison service Shoppingscout24 in which certain retailers are able to be excluded in a preselection. In connection with possible localization of users personalization can become the decisive success factor of mobile services. If exact position data of the regional dealers are also available, the possibility can be offered to reduce considered dealers to certain perimeters and to include stationary dealers in price comparisons for users of mobile price comparisons. The price comparison can therefore be expanded from the internet supply to the electronic commerce by regional dealers. Customers would be ready to pay a little bit more due to the personal contact and inexistent shipping and handling costs. In addition interesting offers could be transferred to small mobile devices for them as soon as they are in the proximity of an advertising local dealer (push concept). This presupposes a considerably higher cooperation between price comparison services and the participating dealers, though. Both online and stationary dealers can obtain an increase of customers and in sales as well as increase in their popularity by the beneficial and specific transmission of desired advertisements to interested users of the mobile internet. For stationary retail trade the possibility of not only intervening the price comparison by reacting passively but by proceeding actively by means of advertising for own offers now arises for the first time. Suppliers of price comparison services can expand their range of products and price comparison by the additional integration of the stationary retail trade. By the supply of LBS the stationary retail trade becomes more attractive for further users and can partly improve the quality of the use data considerably which can lead to further revenues. The effort of the creation of a mobile supply is kept within limits if the already existing price inquiry or available data stocks of the classic price comparison can be used as a base for mobile supply. Cellular network operators primarily profit by utilization of their data services and connected with those higher earnings particularly by transaction dependent direct revenue forms like charges for connection or use. At present the potentials of LBS are being used only rudimentarily by both suppliers of price comparison services and by (online-) dealers. Due to the hindrances and variously available potentials regarding the supply and use of mobile price comparisons it becomes clear that an urgent need for action concerning the involved of mobile commerce consists. Cellular network operators can primarily push mobile access to price comparison services by private users by implementing reasonable, transparent and volume dependent rates for data connections. Dropping costs for multimedia messages as well as the latest data rates of cellular network operators for GPRS and UMTS show that this development has already started to take place [12]. Suppliers of mobile price comparisons should develop their offers according to the ESM principle [17]: Mobile supply should be easy for users to operate, lead fast to usable results and offer a recognizable added value. The offers of the two German precursors of the mobile price comparison HSID publishing company mbh and evendi Gmbh & Co. KG already today show how the mobile price comparison can work in a basic way. A new and additional user group can be developed by the integration of LBS in addition. A successful integration of these location-related services imply, however, that stationary dealers maintain product data in digital form and provide them for price comparison services by the use of suitable interfaces. Furthermore online dealers should offer their customers a supply like that of GuensTiger.de, Google or ebay, which is optimized for the limited resolution of PDAs and smartphones if they want to profit from the potentials of mobile commerce and mobile price comparison. Manufacturers of mobile devices have already begun to equip mobile devices for mobile internet with WLAN, special microbrowsers, additional keyboards and larger displays for better resolution. The universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS), which is a further development of the GSM cellular standard, can play an important role for the further distribution of mobile price comparisons; it can function as link between GSM nets, WLANs and internet. A previous disadvantage of the WLAN solution is that location based price comparison is often not possible due to missing system access points. As a result of the increasing convergence of mobile electronic communication techniques the problem can be reduced considerably. 4. Summary and Future Prospects The potential and the necessary mobile infrastructure for mobile price comparisons are available; however, the utilization is retained. Till now, suppliers of price comparison services haven't managed to expand popularity and acceptance of classic price comparisons to the mobile price comparison. The possibilities of the mobile internet still are hardly exploited in this area. Mobile price comparison can already be alluded to if access to the supply of price comparison services is carried out by small mobile devices with special microbrowsers which can reasonably represent standard web pages in a first step. The full potentials of mobile price comparison can only be obtained if special mobile services are offered in a second step. SMS and WAP services are considered as incommodious early forms of

4 mobile price comparisons; newer developments like evendi-togo make use of java functionality on today's small mobile devices or offer special, mobile optimized web pages. Particularly the possibilities of identification of cellular subscribers and WLAN users as well as localization within the respective net are hardly used for personalization of mobile price comparison and still not at all for location based services (LBS). This is the case even though mobile services for position fixing are considered as a critical success factor to the success of M- commerce altogether and as a key factor to mobile price comparisons. Integration of LBS creates an added value for users in comparison to stationary price comparison and therefore can provide a broader acceptance of mobile supply. For users mobile price comparison is only reasonable when the perceived added value is greater than the additional effort arising from the utilization. Most different business models, especially partial revenue models must be pursued by different market protagonists in M-commerce, and cooperate as smoothly as possible in dynamic value networks. Successful revenue forms of classic price comparison services as until now are not effective for mobile price comparisons. Revenue forms for suppliers are shifted from transaction dependent to transaction independent revenue forms, operators of online shops should keep mobile optimized web pages and WAP pages ready in addition to be able to forward users of mobile price comparison services to shop (forwarding click). The availability of generally accepted mobile paying methods is an important condition particularly for the sustainable success of M- commerce offers in the B2C area. Another important prerequisite for the success of mobile price comparisons is the distribution of internet capable mobile devices. Great potentials are granted to mobile internet in the future particularly due to increasing convergence of the networks (GSM, GPRS, UMTS, WLAN) and the penetration of the cellular market by smartphones which will supersede PDAs. Stationary queries will become partly substituted by mobile ones, however, the amount of queries will increase strongly altogether within the next years and a large part of mobile queries will be carried out by new customers. Classic price comparisons will not be replaced completely due to their greater functionality and better representation possibilities. Mobile price comparisons will be offered as an addition to classic services. The origin of new suppliers with purely a mobile supply is not expected, rather an expansion of the established classic supply to mobile services. If the suppliers of classic price comparisons manage to establish their mobile services then these future applications could provide a broader acceptance of M-commerce and secure mediumterm survival for them in a rigorous disputed market. 4. References [1] Beauvillain, O.: Jupiter Research shows broadband is driving the uptake of paid for content on the internet. broadband.html. Access [2] BITKOM (ed.): Daten zur Informationsgesellschaft. Status quo und Perspektiven Deutschlands im internationalen Vergleich. Access [3] Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Arbeit (Ed).: Monitoring Informationswirtschaft 7. Faktenbericht /bmwi/Faktenbericht_7/pdf/FB7_Vollversion_de.pdf. Access [4] Caglayan, A.K., Harrison, C.G.: Intelligente Software- Agenten Grundlagen, Technik und praktische Anwendungen im Unternehmen. Hanser (2001). [5] Deutsche Bank Research (ed.): B2C-E-Commerce. Internet kein großer Gleichmacher. PROD/999/PROD pdf. Access [6] Eisenmann, M., Linck, K., Pousttchi, K.: Nutzungsszenarien für mobile Bezahlverfahren. In: Pousttchi, K., Turowski, K. (ed.): Mobile Economy Transaktionen, Prozesse, Anwendungen und Dienste. Köllen Druck+Verlag (2004); pp [7] Forschungsgruppe Wahlen Online GmbH (ed.): Internet Strukturdaten. Repräsentative Umfrage 4. Quartal web_iv_04.pdf. Access [8] GuensTiger (ed.): Online-Preisvergleiche: guenstiger.de ist so gefragt wie nie. content=presse. Access [9] Internet Retailer (ed.): Nearly half of e-shoppers start at aggregator sites, a BizRate survey says. retailer.com/dailynews.asp?id=9616. Access [10] Kölmel, B.: Location Based Services. In: Pousttchi, K., Turowski K.: Mobile Commerce Anwendungen und Perspektiven. Proceedings 3. Workshop Mobile Commerce. Köllen Druck+Verlag (2003) [11] Lehner, F.: Mobile und drahtlose Informationssyteme. Technologien, Anwendungen, Märkte. Springer (2003). [12] openpr.de (ed.): Mobilfunk auf der Suche nach neuen Märkten. Access [13] Schmidt, A., Gellersen, H.-W., Beigl, M., Frick, O.: Entwicklung von WAP-Anwendungen. Access [14] Smith, M.D.: The Impact of Shopbots on Electronic Markets. Access [15] Walbrach, M.: Equero Live Preisvergleich. In: Brüggemann, T., Breitner, M.H.: Proceedings 1. Preisvergleichsdienste-Workshop Konzepte, Geschäftsmodelle und Architekturen. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik der Universität Hannover (2003) pp [16] Wirtz, B.W.: Electronic Business. Gabler (2001). [17] Zobel, J.: Mobile Business und M-Commerce. Die Märkte der Zukunft erobern. Hanser (2001).

5