The wireless wallet

The limitations of the user interface is one obvious hurdle that mobile commerce must be overcome.

Consumers making a purchase with a handset could be asked to key in their name, 15-digit credit card number and, if the product is to be delivered, shipping address - a task that would demand extraordinary patience and superb finger agility when dealing with just a few buttons.

Enter the wallet provider. Most people already have encountered e-wallets in the wired Internet on a merchant-by-merchant basis. If consumers want to conduct a transaction with an airline, they must fill in their address and credit card information, for which a password is provided. If a purchase is made with another merchant, the whole process begins again.

This system, however, doesn't eliminate the problems of user interface on mobile devices.

"What you see directly from the merchants [on the landline Internet] is the single-purpose wallet, which doesn't solve the problem that the end user has on mobile," says Scott Blanksteen, director of product marketing for mobile and broadband commerce at Qpass, a wallet provider.

Therefore, the process is a bit different in the wireless world. In general, mobile wallets are provided by software vendors to carriers for which users then register.

Once created, the wallet can be activated with a push of a few buttons and applied to almost any merchant. When Qpass receives the request for wallet information from a carrier, its own servers send the information directly to the merchant. Credit card numbers themselves are not actually involved on the wireless side of the transaction.

Interestingly, the Qpass wallet works on both the wired and wireless Internet, and users can customize information for each. For example, if a customer only wants a business credit card to work on his handset, the wallet can be programmed to access that info only when an order is placed via that handset.

"The wallet is linked to the device, and we can understand which wallet links to which device," Blanksteen says.

The security requirements for accessing the wallet from wired and wireless devices can be different as well. Because of the need for simplicity, the Qpass wallet can be accessed on a wireless device with just a four-digit code."[Service providers] think of handsets as a personal device. That's why they typically only require a PIN." Blanksteen says.