Demandware (one of the early partners on Pinterest’s “buyable pins”) recently released its Q1 Shopping Index finding that digital shoppers worldwide spent less time per visit, but created 22% more baskets and placed 21% more orders compared to the prior quarter.

The company put out a new blog post discussing another finding from the report, saying that “Conversion rate metrics are losing relevance”.

“As the Q1 Demandware Shopping Index shows, shoppers meander from device to device, adopting phones as a true shopping device alongside computers and tablets,” says Demandware Industry Principle Rick Kenney. “This cross-device shopping is up 15% year-over-year. More importantly, cross-device shopping is driving an increase in visits. This would seemingly spell trouble for metrics like conversion rate that rely on visits, right? Wrong. Conversion rate has stuck. What was tried and true is now tired and inaccurate. Even though the very basis of the metric has evolved – visits is the denominator – we still focus on conversion rate.”

“The truth is that visit-focused metrics are simply not in-step with today’s retail reality,” he adds. “Instead, retailers should move away from visit-focused metrics and towards shopper-focused metrics. Those that do will have a much better view of their true performance, and will see there is some really good news.”

As an example of “shopper-first metrics,” he mentions visits per shopper or baskets per shopper, both of which the report found to be up (9% and 13% respectively). He also mentions orders-per-shopper are up 6%.

You can find the full report here and more on the findings here.