• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, July 5, 2015

Using more than one device in the course of a purchase is becoming more common.

This should be no surprise to anyone making purchases, which could be pretty much anyone, but it does pose some rather significant challenges to those doing the selling.

One recent study did somewhat of a breakdown of what buying looks like by device when using more than one in the path to purchase.

As a baseline, cross-device purchasing is happening with 40% of purchases involving a consumer using multiple devices to visit the same retailer, according to the study.

The mobile commerce report by Criteo comprised an analysis of 1.4 billion transactions in 3,000 online and retail travel businesses.

The idea that a person researches on a phone and buys on a desktop doesn’t hold true in this study.

For example, of those who used multiple devices in their path to purchase, 41% completed their purchase on a smartphone and only 37% complete the purchase on a desktop.

Tablet purchasing was slightly higher than smartphones, at 43%, which differs from other studies that show purchasing being higher on smartphones than tablets.

The challenge for retailers is to determine where the sales decision is being made so they may attempt to influence the decision process at that stage.

And then there is in-store purchasing, which dwarfs all other types.

So while there are multiple commerce device actions that retailers need to get a handle on, there’s the off-line linkage to store activity that has to be factored in.

While mobile commerce grows, so do the interconnections of activities on other devices and in the brick and mortar environs.

Mobile commerce didn’t replace desktop and in-store shopping. It became part of it.