British consumers now spend the equivalent of over £6,000 a year online, or about £559 each month, according to a new Tryzens report.

The amount of cash splashed on e-commerce sites is weighted differently depending on the gender of the consumer in question, with men spending £686 on average, while women have a more conservative £475 average monthly output.

In spite of this divide, women actually make purchases from sites offering safe shopping online with greater regularity than men, with two thirds of females carrying out transactions once a week or more.

Food was perhaps unsurprisingly the biggest contributor to average online expenditure, with Brits spending about £132 each month on consumable goods, thanks to the popularity of web-based grocery services offered by the majority of major supermarkets.

The post-work period of 6pm to 8pm represents the peak of online activity for shoppers, while about a fifth of the 1,000 adults questioned in the study said that they do most of their e-commerce browsing between 8pm and 10pm, according to InternetRetailing.

The rise of e-commerce in the past two decades has helped to create a generation of consumers who are entirely comfortable with spending cash online. So it is not surprising to find that those who are most active in terms of online transactions are shoppers between 26 and 45 years of age.

Report spokesperson, Andy Burton, said that a number of factors had contributed to the rapid growth of e-commerce in the UK, including things like the compact geography of the company making it easy for retailers to reach customers through delivery infrastructures.

Burton also said that the internet was opening up a global marketplace which made it easier for consumers to source products affordably, even if they are sold and shipped from overseas locations.