Shoppers to spend £40bn online

Online sales will reach £40bn this year with cyber shoppers forking out £162bn by 2020, research predicts.

Online sales accounted for only two per cent of the total retail spend in 2002 but price-comparison site uSwitch.com predicts it will reach 16 per cent by the end of this year and more than 40 per cent by 2020.

And going online also makes more financial sense as UK consumers could save more than £13bn per year by shopping this way, with each household saving £500 per year on everyday shopping and essential bills, according to figures from the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

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In total, 13.5 million consumers are shopping online and spending an average of four days per year doing so, said uSwitch.com.

But the vast majority (86 per cent) of online consumers suffer some sort of difficulty in making a purchase, with 37 per cent of those who experience problems with an online transaction preferring to abandon it altogether, according to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive for customer service software specialist Tealeaf.