Mobile phones and television set-top boxes could eclipse the PC as a platform for online shopping as e-commerce smartcards replace payment on delivery according to the latest report from Datamonitor. By 2003, $623m of European online spend will be smartcard-based predicts the IT analyst.
But the high unit cost of PCs is already a barrier to e-commerce take-up and the added cost of introducing a smartcard reader would be a further deterrent for consumers. The increasing popularity of mobile phones and set-top boxes meanwhile will draw on their high installed base and the low cost of modifying them to use smartcards for online payment.
However the report cautions that growth will be inhibited by the lack of services in place to add internet functionality to these items. As a result only a small proportion of revenues from online shopping will be made up by e-commerce smart cards in the future, it concludes.
The European online shopping market will reach a value of $775m by the end of this year and in 2003 it will have grown to $8.6bn estimates Datamonitor.
