The results of a survey from Namogoo published last week found that 57.2 per cent of people are willing to admit to making purchases via safe shopping online while they are supposed to be working.

Meanwhile half of respondents said that they visit e-commerce sites while carrying out tasks at home, such as cooking and cleaning. This suggests that more people are willing to compromise their productivity in the office than in a domestic setting.

Just over 46 per cent of those questioned said that they used their smartphone to carry out safe shopping online when they were actually in a bricks and mortar retail outlet getting up close and personal with the product in question. This tactic, known as ‘showrooming’, is common in the UK and shows how important multichannel retail has become in recent years.

As with many other studies looking at the e-commerce market at the moment, this research found that the biggest bug bear that consumers have about online shopping is the often complex process of getting through the checkout on e-commerce sites. Respondents complained of having to repeatedly enter personal information in order to complete a transaction, with most believing that this should become more streamlined in order to boost their interest in web-based purchases.

Another issue raised by a sizeable selection of the consumers questioned was that some sites made it difficult to make amendments to an order, creating further frustrations at a point in the buying journey when things should be at their simplest.

Muddled, overly convoluted e-commerce site interfaces were another of the major annoyances cited, which feeds in with the idea that online outlets need to be as streamlined as possible if they want to continue growing, rather than reaching a sales plateau.