Wireless:
Beyond the Hype
How
Wireless works and what e-merchants need to know
By
Alexis
Gutzman,
Contributing Author,
www.Internet.com
[March
21, 2000] Wireless e-commerce is barely a reality in the
U.S. and already I'm tired of the hype. In the past two
weeks I've read some really outrageous (and occasionally
irrelevant) statistics from folks in the industry about
the growth of wireless e-commerce. My favorite useless statistic
was from an article on one of my favorite developer sites.
It quoted a vice-president of one of the companies that
stands to gain the most from the wireless hoopla. He told
the gullible reporter that "research shows" there would
be 2 billion wireless phones in use by 2003. Simple math
tells us that's absurd -- 2 out of 5 people in the world,
including children, will own wireless phones? Research that
I actually can get my hands on puts the number of digital
phones (only digital phones matter for purposes of e-commerce)
worldwide at closer to 80 million by the same year -- 2003
(Jupiter Communications, July 1999). Dataquest
estimates there will be 21.3 million mobile devices
sold worldwide by 2003, but doesn't indicate how many will
be Web-enabled, again, the relevant subset. Estimates by
Motorola
bring the number up closer to 300 million (based on the
rate of sales to date), but 2 billion is far beyond what
any independent source is estimating.
This
column aims to slice through the hype cloud and provide
you with enough information so that you can begin implementing
the latest technology right away, with enough technical
details to know what will be required of you. So if you're
ready to wireless-enable your own Web site, or even your
brick-and-mortar store that doesn't have a Web site, read
on.
How Wireless Works
Wireless includes any type of device that can handle two-way
real-time communication, such as digital phones, hand-held
devices like the Palm VII, and two-way pagers. There are
two players that you, as a merchant, need to know about:
the service provider, and the wireless data provider. The
service provider is the one who owns the wireless network,
such as Sprint PCS. As a result they own and control the
gateway and dictate what shows up on default home page of
each phone. Generally speaking, the goal is to become a
menu item. In order to be a menu item on Sprint PCS phones,
you have to negotiate with Sprint for the space (and pay
them a lot of money). For each network, you have to go through
the negotiations anew.
MShift, one of the wireless data providers listed in the
resources section at the end of this article, has a patent-pending
process that will make menu items irrelevant or at least
give customers access to their site without being on the
menu and without typing.
If
you wanted to fly solo into the wireless arena, skipping
the wireless data provider, you'd have to negotiate with
each of the service providers for each wireless network
- Sprint PCS, GTE, etc. Then you'd have to write the engine
to convert your product data into the format that the service
providers could handle. This is where the Wireless Application
Protocol (WAP) comes in.
The WAP
The key word here is protocol. A protocol is an agreed standard
for communicating. You've probably used or read the expression
IP (as in IP address), that's the Internet protocol. HTTP
is the hypertext transfer protocol. The Wireless Application
Protocol (WAP) is a standard for having a server talk to
wireless devices. The wireless devices expect the data to
appear in a certain format. The WAP (see www.wap.org for
more information, including the protocol) specifies two
different languages that the wireless data provider can
send to the wireless devices (via the WAP). Those are: HDML
and WML. HDML is the standard in the U.S., WML overseas.
The analogy here is to HTTP being the protocol and HTML
being the language for all things Web.
The
good news is that you, as the merchant, don't need to know
about that.
The Wireless Data Providers
Wireless data providers
are to wireless what Ariba is to B2B: They own the marketplace.
Most e-commerce that takes place via wireless will have
to go through the wireless data providers because they've
already negotiated for the best menu placement on the service
providers' menus or have an alternate solution to being
easily accessed by their customers. A site doesn't have
to be on the menu of the wireless device to be accessible
from the device, but since typing via wireless (especially
digital phone) is so arduous, the most accessed sites will
be those on the menu.
A
perfect example of this was given to me by Scott Moeller,
CEO of MShift: "Schwab is my broker, but I have Sprint,
which has Ameritrade as the broker on their menu. Schwab
is on GTE. I can get to Schwab through Sprint, but I have
to type it all in www.schwabcom/hdml.
Who wants to do that?"
How It Looks to Customers
Since typing is slow,
customers create shopping profiles via wired Web sites,
then once a customer is in the system, he can shop with
one-click ordering via his wireless device. MShift is the
only wireless data provider I talked with who is live in
e-commerce right now (as usual, if you know of others, please
let me know for a possible follow-up article). Visit their
site www.mshift.com
to see how this works for the customer.
The
difference between shopping with, for example, MShift, and
shopping on a typical aggregator or portal site is that
on the wired Web, once the customer finds the product he
wants, he clicks through to the merchant site and makes
the purchase. With the wireless aggregators, the purchase
is made directly with them, then fulfillment and customer
service issues are handled by the merchant.
How Merchants Work with Data Providers
Most of the wireless data providers seem to be taking all
comers. They're signing up merchants in the same way that
shopping engines (like MySimon, Deja, or PriceScan) do.
They'll list your products without any exclusive arrangements.
You, as the merchant, can either provide a product file
to them, provide access to your database for them to pull
out the data they need, or have them spider your site for
product information (worst of the three options). You have
to be able to accept orders via XML, 832 EDI, or API in
real time.
Resources:
MShift is live on all wireless networks that permit Web
access.
Contact info@MShift.com
for more information.
IQOrder
(www.iqorder.com)
will be live in the wireless arena in April. They have a
shopping engine on the wired Web today.
Contact eileen.proctor@iqorder.com
for more information.
I3Mobile
(www.i3mobile.com)
will translate your content for delivery via WAP-enabled
devices, but implementing e-commerce via voice at this point.
Contact ebaryluk@intelligentinfo.com
for more information.
Alexis
D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant
and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!,
and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com
Back to Pressroom
