News

04 Jan 2018

Nine in ten small businesses expect to sell online by the end of 2018

Some 90% of small UK business owners intend to sell their products online by the end of the year, new research has shown.

The figure represents a huge increase on the 64% of owners which currently claim to sell online. The data is taken from Amazon UK and Capital Economics’ SME Growth Tracker for the final three months of 2017.

This growing interest in e-commerce is thought to be driven by a surge in small UK business owners planning to sell items via their own company websites in the year ahead.

The research found that whilst 50% of small business owners made plans to sell online through their own sites last year, 68% intend to do so in 2018.

Some 24% of small firms plan to sell online via their own mobile apps in the next 12 months, compared with 13% which did so last year, demonstrating the widening uptake of the technology.

Meanwhile, the proportion of small businesses intending to sell online through third-parties rose from 21% to 27 percent since last year.

Overall, the data showed that smaller retailers which sold online were far more positive about their outlook for the year ahead than those which didn’t.

Commenting on the data, the project’s chief economist at Capital Economics, Mark Pragnell, said, “While the figures show confidence remains low among SMEs as a whole, e-commerce users are less pessimistic about business conditions over the next twelve months. This is perhaps due to their expected increase in revenue over the festive period from online sales.”

Indeed, the study found the small businesses that used e-commerce expected much faster revenue and job growth in 2018 compared with those that didn’t. Small e-commerce firms predicted revenue growth of 1.9 percent and job growth of 0.8 percent, compared with 0.6 percent and 0.4 percent respectively for those non-e-commerce businesses.

Read more like this here