Introduction
Mobile commerce is a subset of e-commerce, which enables people use wireless devices to access to e-commerce system and conduct business transaction. It is believed that rapid development of radio-based wireless communication technology, together with the accessibility of the Internet contributes to the emerging of mobile commerce (Wu and Wang, 2005). Mobile commerce furnishes people a possible way to trade whenever it is needed with a tiny mobile device. According to Mallat (2007), there are some major services of mobile commerce being concerned most, one of which is mobile ticketing service. This service allows customers bought tickets online using their small screen device and relatively more successful than the other mobile payment service.
This essay is structured as followed. In the next section, it will give a specific application of mobile ticketing system coupled with reason of emerging success. Then the potential challenges will be released. Lastly, some recommendations of direction towards the future development will be given.
Application and Reasons of success
A well-known application of this system is public transportation ticketing. In the capital of Finland, Helsinki, public transportation has offered a mobile ticketing service since 2001.At first, it was applied in trams and underground, and lately it was introduced to local trains, ferries, and certain buses. Customers need to send 4 characters SMS to a certain premium service number and they will receive a confirmation text as their tickets. Tickets bought on the mobile channel are cheaper than normal one. Around 1900,000 mobile tickets are bought in one year and about 17 percent adult single tickets were bought by mobile devices (City of Helsinki, 2013). It seems to be prosperous example of mobile ticketing system.
There are three main reasons of emerging this success of application. Firstly, the