Of this proportion, tablet devices account for 85% of mobile sales so far this year with smartphones making up the remaining 15%.

It’s almost certain that m-commerce will continue to increase as a proportion of online sales, not least because there’s so much room for growth among existing smartphone owners.

A separate survey included in the Econsultancy Mobile Commerce Compendium found that half of smartphone owners (51%) hadn’t made a purchase using their smartphone in the previous six months, so there’s still huge potential for mobile sales to increase.

Multichannel sales

However it’s also important for retailers to try and get a better view of the entire customer journey, rather than just focusing on which device or channel actually achieves the conversion.

For example consumers will often research their purchases on mobile or in-store before finally making a purchase online, and this is impacting the way that multichannel retailers structure their businesses.

B&Q’s director of omnichannel Michael Durbridge recently told us that his company had begun giving shop staff attribution for online sales in their geographical region.

But one of the key challenge in any omnichannel strategy is how to track the customer journey between offline and online sales channels.

According to Durbridge:

We’ve got full tracking in place across desktop and mobile if customers are logged in, but what we haven’t got yet is the tracking between in-store activity and online. The key challenge for that is coming up with a unique identifier for each customer.

Durbridge is one the speakers at Econsultancy’s Jump event on October 9, which is all about creating seamless multichannel customer experiences. 

Now in its fourth year Jump will be attended by more than 1,200 senior client-side marketers and forms part of our week-long Festival of Marketing extravaganza.