In 2013, annual growth in internet retail sales remained strong: year-on-year growth stayed at the same rate seen in 2012, defying expectations of a slowdown.

We think increasing participation in shopping via tablets and smartphones contributed to this strong growth, and we think it is helping to keep growth rates high in 2014.

Shopping via different devices is addressed, along with a number of other issues, in our consumer research. Our consumer survey this year asked:

• Which devices (laptop/desktop, tablet or smartphone) respondents had used to buy products online in the last 12 months, and whether they used them at home or out of the home;

• Which product categories respondents had bought online in the last 12 months, and whether they did so using a laptop/desktop computer, a smartphone or a tablet;

• Which factors or innovations would most improve the online shopping experience for them;

• Usage of customer service and delivery/collection options when buying online;

• Likelihood of using these customers service and delivery/collection options again;

• Which retailers respondents have bought from online in the past 12 months, for food and non-food purchases separately.

The focus of this report is online shopping for physical products – not services or digital products, which are excluded from our market size. However, our consumer survey did ask respondents whether they had bought digital entertainment purchases; and we supplement our market size with digital entertainment sales figures in the section, Digital Spending.

Other Mintel reports that may be of interest include:

• Holiday Planning and Booking Process – UK, November 2013

• Music and Video Purchasing – UK, August 2013

• Books and E-Books – UK, September 2013

• Video Games and Consoles – UK, September 2013

Our market size and forecast is retail sales transacted online, and we use data from the Office for National Statistics as the basis for our figures.

Online retail sales exclude purchases of services such as travel or event tickets. The market includes online business-to-consumer sales by all types of retailers – ie pureplays and multichannel retailers such as store-based and catalogue retailers. It excludes consumer-to-consumer sales such as private sellers on eBay.

Our market size and online sales figures for leading retailers include click-and-collect purchases where these are paid for online, but exclude reserve-and-collect where the payment is made in-store on collection.

The market sizes in this report may differ from market sizes on the Mintel Market Sizes service (formerly Global Market Navigator) due to different definitions of e-commerce.

Financial definitions used are:

• Sales: turnover as reported by the company, excluding VAT.

• Operating profits: pre-tax profits plus interest, less non-trading income such as the sale of fixed assets and any exceptional items, including provisions.

• Pre-tax profits: the net trading profit after deducting all operating costs including depreciation and finance charges, but before deduction of tax, dividends and other appropriations.

• Operating margin: operating profits as a percentage of sales.

Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland.

In general, all company sales data are quoted excluding VAT.

Consumer spending data and retail sales data (including forecasts) are quoted including VAT unless specifically stated otherwise.

VAT-exclusive retail sales data are used to calculate market shares.

The UK reduced the standard rate of VAT from 17.5% to 15% on 1 December 2008, before increasing it to 17.5% on 1 January 2010 and 20% on 4 January 2011.