Taking the 15-minute walk from her home to her office in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, every morning, Noriko Kato, 29, looks at the tiny screen on her DoCoMo 505i mobile phone to check her e-mail and sometimes access her favorite shopping site, run by Netprice Ltd.

Purchasing goods ranging from a necklace to cosmetic essence to cake via her mobile phone became a monthly routine for Kato since last summer, when she received a flier in the mail displaying mobile shopping items from the online seller.

"I check items in a paper catalog first and access the mobile site to order," she said. "Using a mobile handset is a lot easier than filling out a mail-order form and going to the mailbox to send it."

Kato opts for mobile shopping if there are bargains or items that cannot be found at stores and on personal computer Web sites.

She said she spends from 5,000 yen to 6,000 yen a month on mobile shopping.

The mobile commerce market is rapidly expanding in line with advances in handset capabilities. More and more businesses are entering the field to lure some of the nation's 79 million mobile phone users, especially young women like Kato.

Yahoo Japan Corp. opened an auction site for mobile users in August, and Rakuten Inc., which runs a major shopping site for PC users, increased the number of items handled on its mobile site from 20,000 to 1.3 million in March.

Some firms are already enjoying a thriving business. Netprice, which runs the Chibi Gaza mobile site, more than tripled its sales from the mobile shopping business from the previous year to 3 billion yen in the year between October 2002 and September.

"More people at present shop online via personal computers, but mobile shopping is growing at a much faster pace," Netprice President Teruhide Sato said, noting that about 40,000 people, mainly women aged between 25 and 35, purchase goods on the mobile site monthly.

Netprice's business is based on an economy of scale -- the more people want to buy a certain item, the greater the discount will be.

For instance, a mini Boston-style bag by Christian Dior recently was introduced with a price tag of 25,000 yen. But after 86 people registered to buy one during a weeklong promotion, the price was reduced to 17,800 yen.

People can use their mobile phones to check real-time information on which items are selling well and on how many have signed up to purchase goods, Sato said, noting how online shopping has become "like a game."

Mobile phone users are also increasingly apt to subscribe to businesses that send fiction and nonfiction literature to their handsets, including Sharp Corp.'s SpaceTown Book site set up in June and Papyless Co.'s online bookstore, which opened in October.

Shinchosha Co., a major publisher, has gradually increased its online readership to 25,000 since it opened a mobile site offering 15 to 20 works by contemporary writers about two years ago. Subscribers can download part of a fiction story every day for 100 yen or 200 yen per month.

"We asked writers to write stories specially for our mobile service, although they are also published as books later," said Shinchosha spokesman Junsuke Uchiyama.

Instead of letters, some writers use pictographs, which young people put in their e-mail messages, in order to entertain such viewers, he said.

"This business has not been profitable yet, but we hope it encourages young people to read more books," Uchiyama said.

The mobile commerce market, including download services for "chakumero" handset-ringer music, shopping and ticket reservations, is predicted to expand to 1.78 trillion yen in 2007 from 321 billion yen in 2002.

As people get used to shopping on PCs and conventional mobile services like "chakumero" saturate the market, more companies will enter the field and offer greater diversity, said Masanori Sato, an analyst at think tank Mitsubishi Research Institute.

"Women in her teens and 20s are prime customers for mobile shopping because their main tools to access the Internet are not PCs but mobile phones," he said.

Despite the bright forecast, there are pitfalls.

"When there are many sites, mobile users have a hard time finding a specific one," Sato said. "Users also worry about telecommunications costs while engaging in mobile commerce."

Pictures appearing on the latest handsets have become much clearer thanks to technological advances, but the screens are still small, discouraging people from mobile shopping, he added.

To be successful, mobile shopping providers must link their sites with other media, including TVs, magazines and free papers, to publicize their online shops and enable consumers to get a good look at their products, according to Sato.

Xavel Inc. placed advertisements of its girlswalker.com mobile shopping site in various fashion magazines and on billboards at 40 places in Tokyo this month.

The firm had 5.7 million registered members on the site without spending any money on ads after it started the service in September 2000, Xavel President Fumitaro Ohama said.

"Now we need to build a good brand image to obtain more customers," he said.

The firm expects to double its sales from the previous year to 5 billion yen this fiscal year, he said.

"I think mobile commerce will really take off in 2006 or 2007, with the spread of third-generation mobile phones that can transmit large volumes of data at higher speeds," Ohama said. "We've got to boost our customers' loyalty" to survive intensifying competition.