A new survey from Ipsos Mori, backed by the Royal Mail, has shown that 26 per cent of UK consumers now carry out safe shopping online once a week or more.

This is up by four percentage points compared with a year earlier, suggesting that e-commerce is still gathering steam as more Brits choose to buy from the web rather than make a purchase at a bricks and mortar outlet.

Part of this increase in orders is down to the fact that 28 per cent of people questioned in the study said that they subscribed to some kind of initiative that netted them free delivery for their online purchases.

Amazon Prime is likely the key culprit here, allowing frequent buyers to save cash so long as they are willing to pay the annual fee and keep shopping through a single retailer’s site.

Researchers also found that there has been a boost to the average amount spent online in the UK, with a typical consumer expected to splash out around £220 every quarter.

There is a downside to this increase in online shopping, with 23 per cent of consumers saying that they had returned products ordered via the web within the past 30 days. This practice is more common amongst women than men, but creates a problem for retailers of all types because of the added costs involved in processing returned goods.

Growing return rates are a concern for other reasons, as they increase the carbon footprint of e-commerce and also mean that there are more delivery vans on the roads, which creates congestion. This will have to be tackled as the popularity of subscription services grows and more consumers in the UK make online orders over the course of each month.