Increasingly, people use multiple devices during a single transactional process. Make sure that you are able to listen and respond to these interactions. For example, an e-commerce retailer should strive to preserve items in a cart across devices – if you add an item to your mobile shopping cart, it should still be in your shopping cart when you log in on your desktop computer.

Recently, I added a pair of shoes from Zappos to my shopping cart, using my mobile phone. Later, I viewed the same shoes on my laptop at home, but didn’t purchase. Finally, on a weekend afternoon, I got an email from Zappos with the subject line “You snooze, You Lose”. Inside the email, the big bold header said “Don’t miss out!” There was an image of my shopping cart, the shoes, and a bright orange tag that said “Only 1 LEFT!”  Needless to say, I bought the last pair of shoes. Zappos had just made my buying experience as easy as taking candy from a baby.

Neil Mohan, Google’s VP of Display Advertising, spoke at a recent conference. Neil said, “If you’re just focusing on mobile, you’re solving yesterday’s problems.” Throughout the day, Neil explained, consumers are flitting back and forth among many devices, from smartphones to desktops, and from laptops to tablets to TVs. “90% of consumers start a task on one device and finish it on another,” he noted. “Consumers are way ahead of where advertisers and publishers are.”

Here’s a chart from Telco 2.0 Research, illustrating the frequency of multi-device paths to purchase:

Source : blog.marketo.com