The number of people choosing to carry out safe shopping online from smartphones and tablets may have hit its peak, with analysts at IMRG revealing that there was no growth in the proportion of sales utilising portable platforms over the past three months.

It has been half a decade since m-commerce did not grow on a quarter-by-quarter basis, suggesting that the UK may be nearing the point at which a balance between shopping on desktop machines and mobiles has been reached, according to Internet Retailing.

In 2010 only 0.9 per cent of e-commerce purchases were made from mobile devices, but in 2015 this has risen to encompass 42 per cent of the market.

Crucially, this finding reveals that while m-commerce spending may be hitting its limit, the number of web visits which are carried out from smartphones and tablets is still on the rise.

60 per cent of site visits registered in the second quarter of 2015 came from portable devices, up two percentage points from the first three months of the year.

This shows that even if people are not going to keep using mobile devices to make purchases, they will choose to carry out product research from their smartphones before completing the process of safe shopping online from a desktop PC or laptop further down the line.

As such, retailers cannot afford to ignore mobile users, since the majority of customers will be visiting e-commerce sites from gadgets with small touchscreen displays.

The good news is that people are more confident about completing purchases on mobile devices, with IMRG finding that conversion rates are on the rise. This could help with a growth in the proportion of sales made from smartphones and tablets in the future, even if a plateau has been reached for the time being.