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Is U.K. E-Commerce Stalled?

Written by Evan Schuman
August 7th, 2008

If it makes U.S. retailers feel any better, their U.K. counterparts aren’t faring any better in making cross-channel and especially merged channel efforts work. The percentage of online sales among those merchants has plateaued, holding steady at 4.4 percent for the last two years, according to a Martec report.

What makes those numbers look even weaker is that those figures have flat-lined while the percentage of U.K. retailers offering E-Commerce sites have been sharply increasing, hitting 68 percent this year, compared with 58 percent in 2007.

Posted in E-Commerce, Software
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One Comment | Read Is U.K. E-Commerce Stalled?

  1. Brian Hume Says:
    August 16th, 2008 at 7:13 am

    The statistics are actually better than they might seem at first sight. The number of retailers with a transactional web site has increased and their share of sales is lower than the 4.4% average. Hence the more established retailers have seen a growing percentage of sales on-line, which is keeping the average where it is. With on-line sales growing at anywhere from 25% to 70% per company and same store sales growing slowly or even declining, some of the retailers with a significant online presence are now starting to see cannibalization of their own store sales to the extent that it is affecting store profitability. Almost no-one has a strategy for dealing with this.

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