MoBank has launched its MoPowered mCommerce service, aimed at merchants looking for a relatively cheap, quick, and accessible entry point into mobile retailing – the small, sub-£1m turnover, businesses which make up over 30 per cent of the online market.

“As a business, spending the last couple of years helping big brands like HMV and Waterstones to set up mobile sites and apps, it had become clear that, for smaller merchants, theres still a barrier to entry for mCommerce,” MoBank CEO Dominic Keen told Mobile Marketing. “Smaller companies acknowledge, like anyone, a significant amount of their traffic is coming from mobile, and that without an mCommerce solution sales conversion is really poor.”

The cloud-based platform, which charges through a pay-per-purchase model,  provides an alternative to the companys bespoke solution. Of course, it could also be adopted by the kinds of big companies MoBank has previously been doing business with – the only difference, according to Keen, is that the end product will be missing a few bells and whistles.

But smaller businesss, which might have missed out on mCommerce opportunities so far, have an advantage over big brands. “One of the key differences,” says Keen, “is that bigger companies have more complex ICT infrastructure and might need more handholding for enterprise-level deployment.”