The typical onine shopper - who braves the net despite the sort of problems which have beset virtual bookshop Amazon, where hackers have been accessing customer credit card details held on line - is single, has a degree and drives a hatchback.

Around one in five frequent shoppers, that's people who buy at least once every two months, spends more than £500 annually on the net, and is happy to buy financial services online (39% do so).

The average regular shopper is 34 and earns £29,300. More than 40% have a first degree - one in 10 has a postgraduate qualification - and more than 40% are single. The most popular internet service provider in this country is Freeserve (used by 18% to access the net), followed by BT Surftime, NTL and AOL, all of which are used by 11% of frequents.

The top products for internet purchase are books, music and software. David Brosse, marketing director of MyPoints, a company which awards loyalty points to people who receive and read tar geted advertising by email and which carried out this research, says: "People tend to start with low ticket items such as these, then move on."

The British spend £2.3bn a year on the net, which will rise to £4.4bn by the end of this year, according to Nick Jones, senior analyst at internet consultancy Jupiter MXL. This makes us the number one net shoppers in Europe, although Mr Jones says that we are still three years behind the US, and never likely to catch up because "they are much more consumer orientated than we ever will be".

He adds that shoppers are spending more on some items on the net than they do in bricks and mortar shops, particularly at book and grocery sites. "It is because once you are in a book site and you are paying to have one book delivered, you may as well pick up another two or three. The same is true of grocery shopping where the problems of buying bulky items is eliminated," he says.