The latest figures from IMRG have shown that although safe shopping online was up by 12.8 per cent last month, there was actually a surprise contraction in the rate with which purchases made via portable devices were increasing in August.

M-commerce rose by 10 per cent year on year, suggesting that people were less inclined to browse and buy from the web during the summer holiday period when the weather was fine and many were taking overseas trips.

Analysts point out that this is the lowest level of growth seen in this particular segment of the market in four years, with report spokesperson, Andy Mulcahy, suggesting that 2018 has been a year of decline.

Part of the problem is that retailers which operate across multiple platforms, with high street outlets as well as sites offering safe shopping online, only managed to boost their mobile sales by one per cent.

In contrast the 15 per cent growth seen for pure play web retailers suggests that digital distributors are doing a much better job of catering to consumers on mobile devices than their multichannel competitors.

Meanwhile another issue indicated as responsible for this slide in growth was that more people made summer purchases at bricks and mortar outlets, especially when looking to buy items for outdoor play, garden work and other domestic tasks and experiences.

Experts were actually projecting a steeper dip in activity than was seen in the end, which demonstrates the resilience of m-commerce in particular and e-commerce in general, even with seasonal disruption taken into account.

Another interesting fact revealed in the study is that people actually spent less on average when buying clothing this summer than in previous years, which is not as a result of lower sales activity, but rather thanks to aggressive discounting by retailers.