You’d have a market that barely exists yet is worth fighting over. At least that’s what Zong, a Swiss-based company, and Boku, a rollup of two other mobile payment companies (Mobillcash and Paymo) are doing. Both offer the same thing: The ability to buy stuff online that gets billed to your wireless account.

In theory, you could use the same technology to buy actual stuff as well, but the businesses are really geared around microtransactions–pretend weapons on the “Mob Wars” Facebook app, piratey stuff on Puzzle Pirates–for which it wouldn’t make sense to use a credit card. They’re also assuming that many of their customers won’t have credit cards, either because they’re kids or because they live in countries where it’s more common to own a mobile phone than a Mastercard.

Both companies are happy to explain why they’re better than their rivals–who covers more territory, who has the better carrier relationships, who has less onerous fees, etc.–but I won’t bore you with that. Similarly, while Boku is formally announcing its presence today, along with $13 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the Zong guys argue that this is really a rebranding of Mobillcash, which had previously received funding from Index and Khosla. Whatever.

The real story here will be if and when the really big platforms for virtual goods–like, say, Facebook, News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace and game companies like Electronic Arts (ERTS)–decide they want to formally integrate one or more of the mobile payment guys, and under what terms.

Right now, for instance, Facebook isn’t involved in any of the microtransactions that any of its apps are generating, and the same goes for mobile payments–each app is free to work with whatever vendor it chooses. But that could change in the near future as Mark Zuckerberg and company start testing their own payments platform. If there is going to be a big market for virtual goods bought via mobile payments, it could get carved up in the near future.

How much did you spend on Friday, and where did you spend it?

We’re likely to see flash analysis of today’s shopping binge before the weekend is over. But J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan has already called a winner for the holiday: Amazon.

Khan’s firm commissioned a study of 766 U.S. consumers about their holiday shopping plans, and 44 percent of them say they’ll be spending less this year. And those that say they’re cutting back say they’ll cut back a lot–an average of 41 percent from previous years.

So Khan figures that overall, holiday shopping will be down “high single-digits to low double-digits” compared to last year.

But there’s one-in-two chance that when you do shop, you’re going to end up buying something at Amazon (AMZN), Khan says:

Nearly 50 percent of respondents plan to shop at Amazon.com this holiday season, and Amazon’s reach is 39 percent higher than its nearest competitor.

Amazon continues to pull in very high percentages of users earning more than $100K, with 59 percent of shoppers in that income category saying they had shopped there; no other site’s reach among that group was above 33 percent.”

And while I’m in lemonades-out-of-lemon mode, I’ll note that Khan also predicts that e-commerce spending will be flat over the holidays.

Given that we saw two reports over the last week (one from MasterCard, another from ComScore) that said that e-commerce was already shrinking compared to last year, that would be good news indeed.

MasterCard Advisors, a unit of the credit card company, says sales in categories like apparel and electronics have dropped more than 19 percent in the first two weeks of November compared to the same time a year ago. E-commerce sales are comparatively better, but they’re still grim–down 7.5 percent, the company says.

Bad news, obviously, for Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY) and everyone else who sells stuff online for a living. If you’re looking for a sunnier take, you can cling to more optimistic predictions from the likes of eMarketer, which thinks that e-commerce will eke out a four percent gain in November and December. UPDATE: Fresh prognostication from Barclays Capital (i.e., the investment bank formerly known as Lehman): three percent growth during the holiday season, which is down from the eight percent the research group had previously predicted.

Too unpleasant to contemplate early on a Monday morning? Agreed. Let’s think about something more upbeat. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that I am going to be able to buy a very nice television for not much money in the next couple months. I just hope I have a wall to hang it on.

[Image Credit: woohoo120]