Male consumers are spending more time shopping online as well as increasing the number of items they order as a result of having easier access to e-commerce services on smartphones.

This is one of the key findings from a new study by First Insight, which also looked at how men and women differ in terms of their habits when making online purchases.

Males tend to spend more time researching potential product options before committing to a purchase than their female counterparts. Amazon is also the first port of call for men looking to buy online, with a larger proportion turning to the site than women.

While women still buy online from their smartphones more frequently, there has been a steep drop in the proportion of men who simply never shop from mobile devices. Less than a fifth claimed to shun portable e-commerce, compared with almost half in the previous year’s report.

In terms of the dominance of online shopping, men revealed that 41 per cent of the retail spending they committed to in the past 12 months went towards web-based sales.

Amazon customers were once again proven to be amongst the most active and sizable group of consumers in the online space, with 60 per cent of men saying they were spending more through the US firm’s site than ever before.

Part of this rise in Amazon’s prominence could be caused by the increase in ownership of smart speakers powered by the Alexa automated system. 42 per cent of respondents reported owning some kind of smart speaker system, which makes voice search and a range of other features more easily accessible, even if this type of device still accounts for a tiny percentage of total e-commerce sales.