Forget the mall -- shopping by cell phone is so 2006

By BOB TEDESCHI
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Calling all retailers: 2006 may finally be the year that consumers start buying goods with their cell phones.

With people already spending billions on ring tones, wallpaper and games for their phones, analysts and retail executives say they believe it will not be much of a leap to get them to use their phones to buy shoes, books and laptops.

"This will start to show up on the radar screen in 2006," said Roger Entner, an analyst with Ovum, a technology consulting firm in London. "The more different pieces we add to these Swiss Army phones, the easier it is to get user acceptance for the next application. And especially around next Christmas, the convenience of shopping on a computer or a cell phone will beat the mall hands down."

Back in 1999, electronic retailers such as Amazon.com created miniature Web sites that could be browsed on cell-phone handsets, but these companies overlooked something critical: Few consumers owned phones that could render images similar to those displayed on a personal computer. Now, Entner said, 190 million people in the United States have a cell phone, and at least 150 million of those have a color screen.

Back then, consumers cared little about using their cell phones for anything other than chatting. Now they are quickly accepting phones as multipurpose devices. This year, consumers will spend more than $3 billion on ring tones, video clips, games and other services -- to say nothing of the money they are paying phone companies for the extra airtime required to use those services.

EBay, which, like Amazon. com offered users years ago a way to shop its site on cell phones, plans to introduce to Verizon users this month a new version of mobile phone technology that will allow subscribers, for $4 a month, to browse the site, bid on items and receive alerts whenever they have been outbid.

The service, which already is available to users of Cingular and Sprint, is a premium version of a stripped-down program that is available free on any phone with a Web browser. EBay introduced the free version in June.

"These kinds of services are still pretty new in the U.S.," said Chris Donlay, an eBay spokesman, "so I think it'll take a while to get some critical mass, but people are using our service, and they seem to like it."

One of eBay's challengers, Overstock.com, which sells travel services and products for fixed prices and at auction, also recently forayed deeper into the wireless realm. In November it started Mobile O, where cell-phone users can use their phones to browse and buy anything on Overstock's Web site.

The service was initially intended for customers of Verizon Wireless, who pay $5 to activate it. Jeanne De Sanctis, chief executive of mRocket, which developed the Mobile O application for Overstock and markets similar services to other companies, said Mobile O would be available on Sprint this week

Security has been a concern for both retailers and cell-phone companies; neither wants to be held responsible by consumers if their credit card information is pilfered as it is entered into their handsets.

EBay avoids that problem by not giving users the option of paying by phone. They can win auctions or even secure most "Buy It Now" purchases using their cell phones, but they must pay for the purchases through their PCs. Overstock allows users to tap in credit card or login information securely, using data-encryption methods.

Byrne said he expected many early Mobile O subscribers to use it to compare prices while they were shopping. Alex Poon, chief executive of Bonfire Media, said he had witnessed such behavior from many users of eBay's mobile service.

Consumer Reports magazine added to the cell-phone shopping trend with last month's introduction of ShopSmart. For $4 a month, Verizon Wireless and Sprint customers can use their phones to check prices and read product reviews, among other things, on thousands of items.