E-commerce in the UK: Statistics and Beyond!
The UK is the world’s third-largest e-commerce market following China and the US.
The size of e-commerce market in the UK and Japan are relatively close to each other. There are statistics showing the UK e-commerce market ranked right below Japan. For example, from the revenue perspective, recent research conducted by Statista shows the UK ranked as fourth globally, following Japan.
The most recent data collected by ONS suggests that e-commerce sales by businesses in the UK non-financial sector were £688 billion in 2018 showing an 18% increase compared to £582 billion in 2017. This was also the largest annual growth in e-commerce since 2014 (comparable records began in this year).
The observed growth in total e-commerce sales in the UK has been mainly driven by an increase in website sales since 2014.
Another cause of the increase in e-commerce sales is the increase in businesses’ turnover derived from e-commerce. In 2018, the proportion of businesses’ turnover derived from e-commerce reached 18.4%, showing a1.8% points compared to 2017.
The distribution of e-commerce sales in the UK among B2C and B2B is also presented in the figure below:
Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales in the UK has also demonstrated a continuous increase over the last decade.
However, the latest IMRG Capgemini Online Retail Index suggests an all-time low increase in UK’s e-commerce in 2019, namely only a 6.7% increase. This low growth rate was mostly due to a low performance in the first half of 2019. Online retail sales grew only 5.4% in the first half of the year, compared to the same period in 2018. In the second half, e-commerce sales grew 7.6 percent year-on-year, with showing an incredible performance of 16.4 percent year-on-year increase in November. Thus, this can be seen as a recovery from the performance in the first half of 2019.
As presented on the figure below, wholesale and manufacturing sectors are the two driving forces of e-commerce sales in the UK.
Results of an annual interview conducted by ONS in 2019, clothes and sports goods are the most popular goods purchased online in the UK. The results also suggest that more than 40 percent of individuals in the UK purchased holiday accommodation, household goods and event tickets online.
