Tesco Online Shopping

The British spend more when doing their grocery shopping online than in stores, according to a study by Lightspeed Research.

Almost 60 per cent of Britons who do their main grocery shop online spend between £51 and £100 on each shop, compared with 42 per cent of offline shoppers.

The survey revealed that online consumers tend to shop less frequently than those offline in supermarkets, but correspondingly spend more.

Supermarket giant Tesco is by far the favourite, with 71 per cent of online shoppers having used the service.

Waitrose online is preferred to in-store, with 14 per cent of shoppers using the retailer for their main online shop, but only 2 per cent would actually go to the supermarket.

Lightspeed chief executive officer David Day said: "Grocery retailers need to understand the different purchasing patterns of their online- and store-based customers.

They blame increasing business rates and council tax as well as growing competition from online shopping and, now, Tesco home deliveries. The latest blow for town shops was Copeland Borough Council's decision to charge businesses wanting to place items like signs on pavements. That costs £80, and for outside tables and chairs the fee is £130. Council rates and other expenses such as insurance policies and costs associated with health and safety requirements are all eating into the profit margins of Millom's traders. Co-manager of Millom's Bridge Café, Russell Townsend said: “The council and others want to take a good look around Millom and see how many businesses have shut down. They'll turn it into a ghost town because of all the taxes and legislation that is coming out. “Some of the businesses have run for hundreds of years and then over the last five, come to a standstill.

The recently launched rankings of the UK's top 50 online retailers reveals some signs about the state of the UK retail sector in the run up to Christmas - the busiest time of the year for e-tailers of any kind.The study, commissioned jointly between the Interactive Media Retail Group (IMRG) and Hitwise, ranks sites on visits - or popularity - throughout the month of October 2006, but doesn't include auction sites or shopping comparison sites such as Ebay, Kelkoo or Froogle. Sitting at the top of the table is Amazon UK, which continues to lead the way in the UK retail market - despite the fact that it lacks a bricks-and-mortar presence on the high street.This trend is the norm rather than the exception when it comes to sites that dominate the top ten of the 'Hotshops' list; only Tesco and Argos have a significant offline presence, which they are using to their advantage in the hunt for online spend.

From today shoppers can give to UK charities while they spend withhundreds of brands - yet the prices they pay will not change.www.retail-charity.com is an online shopping mall which turns the traditionalconcept on its head by donating 50% of its revenues to UK charities.