EBay and Amazon have maintained their positions as the UK’s most popular online retailers.

In both November and December, eBay had 15 million visitors, with Amazon’s traffic growing to 14 million in November and 11.4 million in December, according to figures from Nielsen Online.

Asda and Marks & Spencer were both in the top 10 most visited sites and achieved the strongest growth since 2006, with site visits up 68 per cent and 54 per cent respectively.

Nielsen Online internet analyst Alex Burnmaster said: “The top 10 retailers, on average, were visited by 33 per cent more people than they were during the same period in 2006. This is particularly impressive, considering that the internet population itself only grew by 10 per cent in this time.”

Swarovski experienced the biggest rise in visitors, with its audience growing 201 per cent between November and December 2006 to the same period in 2007.