In mobile commerce applications such as stock trading and electronic auction, conventional transaction processing techniques fail to perform satisfactorily as the long broadcast cycle in mobile computing environments is a big barrier to maintaining the standard notion of correctness in transaction processing. Moreover, the number of read-only transactions in these applications is far greater than the number of update transactions. Therefore, processing mobile read-only transactions effectively is an important performance issue. This research proposes a weaker form of consistency for read-only transactions to improve the performance of mobile systems. With the weaker form of consistency, new algorithms will be devised to process read-only transactions at the mobile clients. Design issues for the new algorithms include autonomy, efficiency of processing transactions at the mobile clients, timeliness of the system and freshness of data read by the transactions.