M-commerce is buying and selling through a wireless link to the internet — a phone, a tablet, or a laptop on Wi-Fi or mobile data, not a computer that must sit on a cable. The m is from mobile, on the same pattern as e-commerce, where e is from electronic. Paying in a shop with a phone, ordering food in an app, buying a ticket while you sit on a train: that is m-commerce. Business people and newspapers use the word more than friends do; in ordinary talk people just say they bought it on their phone. In the 2000s it sounded new. Now the idea is so normal that many people never say m-commerce at all, even while they do it all day.