The UK ecommerce market has huge buying power and excellent digital infrastructure. The country has a high population density and percentage of online GDP.
Brexit may have started off with a period of disruption. However, the UK is a strong economy with a strong digital landscape and it’s likely to stay at the forefront of ecommerce worldwide.
Read about:
Last Updated on August 27, 2021 by Zeljko Drazovic
Download “Ecommerce in the UK: useful fact sheet & infographic” for easier reading and sharing with coworkers. Sell (more) online in the UK!
The ecommerce market in the UK is competitive and customer-oriented. According to many analysts, ecommerce now accounts for more than 1/4 of all retail sales in the UK and is expected to reach nearly 1/3 of all retail sales by 2024.
Worth over £220 billion, the UK is considered to be the third biggest ecommerce market globally. Last year, UK businesses saw a 57% increase in worldwide ecommerce sales.
According to Statista, in the UK ecommerce market:
Online shopping has become a daily norm for millions of UK consumers who have great expectations when it comes to customer and user experience, delivery speed and smooth returns procedures.
The chart below illustrates changes in shopper spend in the UK quarter by quarter between Q1 2019 and Q2 2021.
The UK is a competitive and customer-focused market. British buyers can be pretty demanding when it comes to customer service. For this reason, online sellers should strive to provide quality customer service and instil confidence in their clients. This can be achieved through customer-oriented actions, for example by ensuring hassle-free returns.
Customer expectations in the UK include:
The UK infrastructure is comprehensive, efficient and modern. The need for efficiency has resulted in low pricing for deliveries.
The UK’s compact size has its benefits compared with bigger countries, such as Russia, the USA or Australia, where you can expect longer delivery times.
In the UK next day deliveries are commonplace. Shopping online feels almost as immediate as shopping in-store. This is extra important to consider after Brexit has become reality and moving goods across the EU-UK border has become less straightforward.
Finally, it’s important to provide your (potential) customers with payment methods of their preference.
In the UK, 2020 was the biggest mobile shopping year to date. Consumers spent collectively 82 billion hours in shopping apps (30% up from 2019). Popular retail apps in the UK included Amazon and Tesco Groceries.
Check the charts below to better understand UK traffic and order growth as well as traffic share by device.
Shopping from a mobile device is fuelling the growth of ecommerce in the UK. Thus, ensuring a great mobile buying experience should be on online sellers’ priority lists.
The UK ecommerce market imports and exports heavily. The most intensive B2C ecommerce trade between the UK and the USA is the result of the common linguistic background.
The UK also trades with the EU (e.g. Germany, France or Netherlands), China and some other Asian countries (e.g. UAE or Hong Kong).
As to the impact of Brexit on UK businesses (especially in ecommerce), exports to the EU plunged 68% in the month after Brexit (Road Haulage Association).
The necessity to pay VAT and complete customs declarations have made the UK-EU trade less straightforward and less cost-efficient.
As a result, some UK ecommerce brands have stopped selling to the EU as it’s no longer financially viable. Similarly, many small ecommerce businesses located in the EU have stopped selling to their UK-based customers.
However:
The initial disruption at the begininng of 2021 doesn’t show the whole picture of what the post-Brexit ecommerce reality may look like.
In fact, it’s still too early to assess the full impact of Brexit on ecommerce since we need concrete data for a longer period of time. While Brexit equals temporary disruptions, in the long term it may not turn out to be a massive blow to the ecommerce sector.
The truth is that online shopping both in the UK and the EU is massive and this is unlikely to change any time soon.
As a result, selling in the UK is worth considering: a well thought out international sales strategy should help you overcome the initial hurdle of translating and localizing your listings.
About Webinterpret: translate & localize your marketplace listings
Webinterpret enables marketplace sellers to instantly expand worldwide. Our automatic ecommerce solution will help you avoid all the hassle of translating and localizing your product listings so you can quickly & easily boost your online sales. Contact our ecommerce experts for more information.
Webinterpret enables online retailers and marketplace sellers on eBay and Amazon to instantly expand worldwide and boost their online sales.
Copyright © 2024 Webinterpret. All rights reserved.
