While m-commerce may not have quite reached the tipping point to take off, the good news is that plenty of consumers are still using their handsets to buy things.
The bad news is that the majority of them aren't that enthusiastic about emerging mobile payment services - possibly because they're not even sure what they are.
A consumer survey conducted by MasterCard across 14 Asia-Pac markets - and presented during the CommunicAsia Summit Thursday - found that mobile shopping is happening at higher percentages in emerging markets such as Indonesia, China and Thailand (between 55% and 51% of respondents), compared to around 40% for Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore, and between just 18% and 19% for Australia and New Zealand.
"The higher numbers in Indonesia, China and Thailand could be because many of them are skipping the PC and going to mobile right away," said Philip Yen, group head of Emerging Payments for Asia/Pacific, Middle East and Africa at MasterCard.
But there's also a lot of confusion about what counts as an m-commerce service. Consumers were asked their likelihood of adopting new services such as NFC, in-app shopping, in-game shopping, mobile financial investment, digital wallets, peer-to-peer payments and SMS-based payments, over 50% of respondents said they were only "somewhat likely" to try them.
"What we found is that a lot of people aren't sure what these services are," said Yen. "So there is a large gap between awareness and familiarity of mobile commerce that needs to be addressed."