SMEs are falling behind in the race for online sales, finds new study

Small businesses in the UK are falling behind larger ones in making online sales, finds a new study of government data by digital marketing agency Koozai.

The study, which analysed the latest datasets on the ecommerce activity of UK businesses from the Office of National Statistics, found that just 23% of small businesses (with 249 employees or less) are making sales online – compared to nearly 60% of large businesses (with 1,000 or more employees). This comes despite the value of ecommerce sales in the UK having risen by between £6.9 and £16.3 billion every year since 2015.

The latest figures also show a 13.12% year-on-year drop in the value of online sales for smaller businesses, compared to a 11.8% year-on-year increase in online sales for large businesses. More than 1 in 4 (28.44%) small businesses do not even have a website, compared to only 3.1% of large businesses.

The study also shows that the extent to which businesses are embracing ecommerce differs by industry. Retail has the largest proportion of businesses that make sales online (48.3%), compared to just 5.5% of construction businesses. However, the proportion of businesses making online sales fell slightly year-on-year in every sector, except for the wholesale industry, which experienced a 5.8% increase in businesses making sales online.