Ita O'Sullivan of Rye, New York, would never have tried buying groceries online only that her friend persuaded her to. Her experience was "absolutely fantastic", she said.

She signed up to become a member of Shoplink.com and someone from the company came to her home to teach her how to order her groceries online on a weekly basis. She could also have signed up for dry-cleaning and shoe repairs if she so wished.

She arranged to have her orders delivered to her front door every Tuesday and she could change her order up to 24 hours beforehand.

The goods were delivered in heavy, well-packed boxes - meats were kept frozen on ice - and when the delivery truck returned the next week with another order, it took away the old boxes.

Shoplink.com offered the first three months of the service for free and thereafter would have charged $35 (€39) per month. "It was so convenient and I thought it was wonderful," Mrs O'Sullivan said.

Her exuberance with buying online did not last long. She had only received three deliveries when she learnt three weeks ago after seeing an article in an old-technology newspaper that Shoplink.com had gone belly-up, one more casualty in the rapidly shrinking dot.com world.

Shoplink.com, the online grocer that served Westchester County in New York and Connecticut was the second online grocer in the same week to announce that it was closing down.

Streamline.com, also based in Westwood, Massachusetts, went out of business. Online grocers, which had shown such promise only a year ago, have come under attack in the past few months for their continuing losses.

About 30 per cent of Shoplink's orders came from the New York region where about 2,200 of its 5,000 customers were based. In a letter on its website, the company said that orders already placed would not be billed or delivered.

According to a November study from WebMergers.com, at least 130 Internet companies have shut down since January this year with the loss of about 8,000 jobs.

These closures accelerated in November with 21 companies closing in the first half of the month compared with 22 for the whole of October, then the highest to date.

Nearly 100 of the closures involved companies that addressed the consumer market, 26 closures occurred in the business-to-business field and the remainder were general sites targeting both consumer and business audiences.

Electronic commerce players, some of them unprepared to face a gruelling holiday buying season, accounted for about 60 per cent of the failures. Content sites made up a further 25 per cent.

Nearly 35 per cent of the shutdowns were in the state of California, New York accounted for 11 per cent and European companies made up 8 per cent.

When WebMergers polled experts to see why 130 Internet companies shut down before they could even find merger partners, they offered these explanations:

Some Internet companies do not have a sustainable business model and others have not built up a strong management team, proprietary technology, customer lists, brand or other assets.

Many of the failed companies were waiting for second or third round funding but the investors fled.

Some companies waited until after their cash began to run out before they tried to sell themselves. Most advisers recommended that a mergers and acquisition strategy be implemented early on while cash is still plentiful.

Bricks and mortar companies have not been rushing to buy Internet companies. According to WebMergers.com's M&A Report, non-Internet companies accounted for only 9 per cent of dollars spent to acquire Internet destinations in the second quarter of this year.

Some recent shutdowns in the United States include TheMan.com, a men's interest site based in San Francisco; Furniture.com, a furniture retailer based in Framingham, Massachusetts, Chicago-based BeautyJungle.com and Pets.com, a pet retailer from San Francisco. Although Pets.com pulled the plug on November 7th after it failed to find a financial backer, this month it made one final act of kindness. It donated more than 21 tons of dog food to help Alaska's dog mushers. The collapse of the salmon runs on the Yukon River this year left mushers with too little fish to feed their dogs and so some of them were faced with the choice of killing their dogs or watching them starve. The online retailer waited until it was in liquidation to act so it wouldn't have to hear from disgruntled shareholders who wanted to sell the inventory instead. "Even a struggling dot.com still has a responsibility as a company," said John Cummings, director of investor relations at Pets.com. "Our company is committed to pets, to animal welfare. Most people at this company are passionate about it."

Another closure was Mortgage.com, an online mortgage services company based in Sunrise, Florida. It has been on its deathbed since it laid off more than 500 employees and began shutting down its operations on October 31st.

In its nearly two years in business, Mortgage.com lost $113 million, changed its business focus from direct consumer lending to providing business-to-business mortgage technology, and was sued over the original deal it made to buy its domain name. There is, however, some light for it at the end of the tunnel. It has sold some of its assets to an Argentinian mortgage company. Mortgage Systems International, a subsidiary of Banco Hipotecario acquired the rights to Mortgage.com's technology and proprietary software on November 16th. Mortgage.com will receive $1.5 million in cash, 25 per cent of equity interests in Mortgage Systems and a two-year option to acquire 5 per cent more equity for another $1.5 million.