Transactions Report - Device type for online and in-person transactions

[anu-rock]

Add a new column "device type" on the Transactions page and its related CSV export that satisfies the following criteria.

An indication of whether an online payment was made on a desktop or mobile will provide a useful data point to the merchant.

Similarly, for in-person payments, we could reveal whether they were received from a card reader, Android or iOS.

Bonus: We could add this report to WooCommerce's Analytics section.

[anu-rock]

The upcoming order attribution feature in WooCommerce is directly relevant to this issue. It seems to capture the device type (eg. desktop) for each order along with other useful information - p6q6po-fgQ-p2

[haszari]

@anu-rock I have a couple of questions understand potential impact and feasibility:

• Is this possible / feasible right now – do we have "channel" (online/in-person) data?
• Where did this idea originate? i.e. was this a request from merchants/support, or an idea from an engineering team, design feedback etc?

[brucealdridge]

I see this as a possible future idea.

The data for this feature exists already

Channel: In-Person / Online
This is stored by WooPayments in against a charge in the transaction metadata, which is stored on the Server. It defaults to Online except when using IPP.

Order Attribution:

• Origin: Direct / Mobile App / Newsletter / Referral [URL] / Organic [source] etc
• Device Type: Desktop / Mobile
  This is stored in the Merchants database against an order. This is controlled by WooCommerce core as Order attribution data.

As there are two separate data sources stored in two different locations (Merchant Database / WooPayments Server) ensuring that the right data is surfaced at the right place could potentially be tricky. One complication that I can think of is the CSV export generation that occurs both on the client and the server.

Both product and design would need to weigh in on how this could work.

[haszari]

Thanks for investigating the data sources @brucealdridge 🙌

WooPayments Channel: In-Person / Online

WooCommerce core Order Attribution:

• Origin: Direct / Mobile App / Newsletter / Referral [URL] / Organic [source] etc
• Device Type: Desktop / Mobile

Looks like there's an opportunity to align more closely with core here. Perhaps we don't need to track this separately in WooPayments. Product + design is a good next step.

[anu-rock]

@brucealdridge Thanks for digging into the details and surfacing them here!

@haszari Happy to share more context about this issue. During early 2024, @souravdebnath1986 and I were ideating on improvements to our reporting capabilities. We thought it would be useful to merchants to see conversion reports for each of their channels and customer origins. See the fourth project on this 1-pagers doc - 1uWhET9tihUuIM4kyKqaEEDS-HehGC3qOKfVkxHTiWAM-gdoc.

Our channel field we currently save for each transaction in Server database was created for identifying the correct channel on the payment details page. It was not created for reporting needs as such. We considered it for this issue only because there was no other reliable way to determine origin back then. So, I agree that aligning more closely with Core is a better idea now.