After such a long period of decline for the eCommerce market, where any positive growth gain made in one week would quickly be eliminated by a drop over the subsequent weeks, we can perhaps be forgiven for being a bit cynical about any return to a growth trajectory that is more consistent and reliable.

In fact, there is something quite uniquely British about our attitude toward it, where pessimism overcomes the evidence of your own eyes; the culture of ‘we’re 2-0 up after 90 minutes, I bet we’ll lose’.

From Relapse to Recovery: Signs the Slide May Be Over

Yet we do have to accept that things do feel like they may have finally started to turn a corner from a trading perspective. The eCommerce market has experienced declines for the past three years; -10% in 2022, -3% in 2023 and -1.7% in 2024. The rate of the declines have been headed in the right direction, but the general momentum behind those figures makes it even more encouraging.

If we break 2024 into two halves and average out the growth rates for them we can see a clear turnaround was taking shape. The first half of the year did see a strong decline of -3%, in line with that of 2023 and seemingly with no progress being made, but the second half of 2024 came in at +1.7%.

The starting point was a really good opening few weeks of September for online trading, and yet immediately talk was of a blip. The weather then was autumnal, which is useful for selling the kind of product ranges retailers buy in for that season. In 2023, those equivalent weeks saw temperatures of 30 degrees, so demand for those products fell very flat and the year-on-year growth figure was skewed by it. This is all true, these were indeed factors in the performance, but the important thing is we didn’t see a huge falling away after the uplift.

Then came the Black Friday peak, and the event moved back a week in the calendar which caused real problems with understanding the like-for-likes; trade looked weak at first, then came a big week when the skewed growth figures were favourable but, on the whole and extending across the Christmas period generally, when the dust settled actually the analysis showed it was pretty good.

A good start to January 2025 trading followed. Once again, pessimism accompanied – the first half of 2024 was poor, particularly the start of the year, so it’s just balancing out. Sure, there is an element of that, but there is a difference here I think. Over the past few years we have often had weeks and months where we are comparing against a period of negative growth from the previous year and we haven’t been able to secure positive growth against it. At the start of this year, 17 of the first 20 weeks have seen positive growth; that simply hasn’t happened with that consistency since 2021 and the pandemic madness.

Peaks, Pitfalls, and Pockets of Growth

It's not just eCommerce where cautious optimism seems to be raising its head again. In areas like hospitality and travel, large company results have been encouraging; the weather has been very sunny with little rain it’s true, but again that difference with the past few years is spend is happening with a bit of consistency whereas results against a bit of sunshine often felt a bit underwhelming previously.

It’s worth adding a caveat at this point: it’s not consistent across all categories. For example, health & beauty is up +15% year-to-date (after 20 weeks) whereas clothing is down -5.6%.

Equally, when the retail peak events come along they don’t all perform the same. So the Mothers’ Day period for example, on a like-for-like basis (the date moves in the calendar each year, in 2025 by three weeks, so this is comparing the week leading into Mothers’ Day for 2024 and 2025 rather than a specific date) was up +12% this year; the week leading into Easter on the other hand (it also moved by three weeks so same like-for-like logic applies here), saw revenue fall -2%.

Be that as it may, the eCommerce market is undeniably more up than down with a lot more consistency recently. Not everything will do well but, after such a miserable period of unending declines, it feels like a return to trading normality and – yes, low single-digit, but still – positive growth is really happening.