The impact of mobile access to the internet on information search completion time and customer conversion

One of the advantages of mobile access to the Internet can be found in that it allows one to conduct information search in a ubiquitous manner. Accordingly, the time for net surfing required to gain necessary information through the Internet is reduced when mobile access is combined with ordinary PC access. As mobile devices continue to advance rapidly, it becomes quite important to find a way to assess the impact of mobile access to the Internet on the performance of e-commerce. Among such performance indicators, of particular interest is the conversion rate, where a customer takes some desirable action at the website, for example, by becoming a member, placing an order and so on. The purpose of this paper is to develop and analyze a mathematical model for describing the information search process through the Internet with or without the mobile access. The analytical framework that we propose in this article enables one to assess the impact of mobile access on information search completion time and the conversion rate. We provide numerical examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the computational procedures that we developed in this research.