A new study, from Rackspace, has found that 45 per cent of consumers from the UK are unhappy with their experiences when shopping online and have turned back to the high street to make the majority of their purchases.

A third of respondents said that they will stop using an e-commerce site if they do not find the products they are looking for within 10 minutes, while a quarter are willing to spend 15 minutes shopping online before calling it quits.

Twenty six per cent of the 2000 people who took part in the survey said that they were dissatisfied with the category descriptions provided by online retailers, while a similar proportion revealed that they do not believe that e-commerce search tools do a good enough job of identifying the right products, according to The Drum.

Of course, these gripes with safe shopping online and the preference for the high street experience shown by certain respondents to the study does not negate the fact that the majority of Brits use e-commerce sites on a very regular basis. Millions of people are choosing to do their Christmas shopping online rather than at bricks and mortar outlets this year.

The problems that people mention in relation to online shopping are fairly uncommon and most major sites offer search systems and interfaces that do not tally with the opinions of the minority expressed in this study.

Report spokesperson, Nigel Beighton, argued that the study showed that the UK’s e-commerce market was a fairly level playing field, in which smaller retailers can take on big rivals by offering a better online shopping experience, even if their prices are not quite as low as the companies with the most weight to throw behind sales.