Museum Shops: Experiences Gained from Developing Electronic and Mobile Commerce Solutions

The phenomenal success of the web provides museum organizations an ideal medium for communication, documentation, promotion, advertisement, dissemination of cultural activities and marketing. Museum shops, which nowadays represent integral parts of the museums, have also a lot to benefit from a successful presence on the web arena. In addition to traditional web sites, carefully designed electronic commerce (e-commerce) sites may increase the potential of museum shops offering possibilities for on-line shopping and other commercial functions, such as online ticketing and digital image libraries organization. In parallel, the recent convergence of the traditionally separate technologies of the Internet and mobile telephony has brought the concept of ‘wireless Internet ’ into the spotlight. Within wireless Internet, ‘mobile commerce ’ (m-commerce) is a relatively new trend that represents a natural extension of e-commerce into the wireless world. M-commerce refers to electronic business transactions and is differentiated from e-commerce since it involves the use of mobile devices and wireless medium rather than wired. The unique characteristics of mobile computing bring forward new challenges and opportunities for museum shops, apart those for businesses. This article presents the design and implementation of an e-commerce and an m-commerce museum shop application for a small Natural History museum. The aim is to evaluate and compare the two applications in terms of several parameters, such as available technologies, strengths and limitations, design requirements, usability, interaction speed, usage cost, etc and also to identify ways for enhancing the potential of such applications and designing successful and profitable business models