One of my concerns with asking customers to do a transaction on a mobile device is the trouble of online forms.

If you think online forms are a pain when you have a big monitor and a full-sized keyboard, try completing a form on a silly little device with a keyboard made for gnomes. I don’t think people are going to want to fill in registration / payment screens.

Some will. The Wall Street Journal has had some success. But we’re in the business of eliminating barriers, and asking customers to switch back and forth between the ABC, the 123 and the Symbol option on their mobile devices is a nightmare as far as usability is concerned.

If you look at mobile commerce from the user’s point of view, Apple and Amazon offer a great experience. If you want to buy something, you’ve already set up an account with all your payment information, so you just enter your password and you’re done.

The trouble for the merchant is that Apple and Amazon keep the subscriber record, and that doesn’t work at all for publishers. We have to have the customer record.

But there are other systems like iTunes and Amazon where the merchant does get the customer’s information. PayPal is the most obvious.

So is PayPal the right solution for mobile commerce for publishers? Should we be integrating our e-commerce (and m-commerce) systems with PayPal? Would that make form completion easier on the user?