Foundations of SMS Commerce Success: Lessons from SMS Messaging and Co-Opetition

As a convenient and low-cost mobile communication technology, Short Messaging Service (SMS) is experiencing very rapid growth. It is reported that 700 million mobile phone users worldwide sent 20 to 30 billion SMS messages every month in 2001. At the same time, SMS commerce applications have emerged to provide mobile users consumeroriented services. The huge SMS messaging customer base serves as the potential SMS commerce customer base [1]. However, the bloom in messaging business does not automatically lead to the success of general SMS commerce applications. In this paper, we analyzed SMS developments in three different countries to derive three success indicators for SMS messaging and relate them to the success of SMS commerce. Based on the proposed SMS application framework, we postulate four additional hypothesized success factors that could uniquely contribute to the success of SMS commerce. Our findings provide practical implications for promoting SMS commerce applications successfully.