Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Additionally, some users might balk at having their personal information entrusted to anyone other than themselves or their favorite retailer.

There are also some basic mobile device technology issues that impact this part of M-Commerce site design. “Payment is a problem if you think of the phone as being just another browser,” said Impact Mobile CEO Gary Schwartz. “It’s not going to work.” That’s because much of the high-tech functionality on E-Commerce sites that (to an extent) can ease the pain of checkout and payment isn’t available on mobile devices.

“It begins to fall apart at the payment piece because of shipping and traditional forms of credit card payments,” said Conrad Sheehan, founder and CEO of mPayy, a company that enables secure mobile payments through users’ checking accounts. “Checkout in E-Commerce is typically multiple screens. It’s quite difficult to get through that process (on a mobile device). We know of a few major retailers who are thinking through that. One, a very large electronics company, is saying they are not going to do credit cards over mobile devices.”

Sears Holdings, one of the few major retailers with M-Commerce sites that allow payments, makes first-time users of its Sears2Go and Kmart mobile sites go through a pretty routine E-Commerce series of steps including the filling out of forms that seek a ZIP code, shipping address, E-mail address, phone number and more.

The system, though time-consuming for first-time users without a store username and password, seems to work and Tom Emmons, who heads Sears’ mobile group, said it is a better idea than using third-party payment companies. “People don’t want to sign up for anything first,” he said. “They just want to” make a purchase.

Sheehan and others whose companies offer alternative mobile payment technology, including Michael Dulong, SVP of business development at mobile payment platform provider Billing Revolution, contend the Sears approach is too cumbersome. They say mobile commerce must be handled as something significantly different than regular E-Commerce.

“If the retailers want to sell products through mobile, the experience must be optimized for mobile,” Dulong said. “Consumers demand a wide variety of purchase options. They do not want to ‘sign up’ online to have the ability to shop from a phone. The Sears mobile site, as do almost all examples today including Pizza Hut, Amazon, Overstock, Papa John’s, Tiger Direct and Barnes and Noble, requires that users first create an account on the traditional Web via PC or Mac. Then the credit card they provide during the online sign-up is leveraged for mobile product orders. And they still have to log-in with a user name and password from a phone. My mantra is: Don’t send me to the Web if you don’t understand mobile.”

Dulong said mobile shoppers should be allowed to buy things without being forced to enter passwords or PINs and without needing to create user accounts on the Web. “The only sign-up should be buying a product with a credit card or debit card,” he said, adding that such convenience is possible with the latest third-party payment technology that can “remember the consumer” after that first mobile purchase.

But for every upside, there’s a downside: the system described by Dulong would allow everybody using the remembered phone to make a purchase whether they owned the device or not.