January 2026 in eCommerce
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This article is a curated industry update, summarising publicly reported developments across the UK eCommerce and technology landscape.
Peak trading check‑in: What the IMRG’s data says
What happened
IMRG’s Online Retail Index shows the 8‑day Black Friday week (Mon 24 Nov–Mon 1 Dec 2025) was down 1.2% YoY overall, with Black Friday itself up 1.3% YoY and Tuesday the standout (+4.4% YoY).
Category split:
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Health & Beauty +8.9% YoY,
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Sports & Outdoors +6.4%,
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Clothing −7.3%.
IMRG’s Peak 2025 Review session on 8 Jan 2026 provides the full November–December read‑out and category breakdowns from the Index (useful for benchmarking your own Christmas numbers).
Why it matters
The underlying implication is that consumer demand is increasingly concentrated around the strongest promotions and the most resilient categories. That often translates into quieter early-January trading, followed by a lift around the first major pay-day of the year.
Regulation watch: data rules & digital markets in 2026
Subscriptions regime under the DMCC (Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers) Act 2024
The UK has a new rulebook for “subscribe and pay every month” deals (the DMCC Act). Think of it like this: if someone starts a subscription, the seller must show simple facts up front, provide a big, obvious “stop” button, and give the buyer two chances to change their mind. Those two chances are 14 days after first joining, and 14 days after it renews.
The high‑level rules are already in the law, but the step‑by‑step instructions are still being written. Once those are finalised, the regime is expected to start around autumn 2026 (later than the planned spring 2026). Reminders, simple online cancellation, and clearer refund rules will be mandatory once the regime starts.
What this means for eCommerce professionals
For eCommerce teams running subscriptions, the message is to start stress-testing sign-up flows, reminder emails and cancellation journeys now, while staying flexible until the final guidance is published.
Digital markets: Search, mobile and app stores
In late 2025 the UK regulator, the CMA, officially labelled Google and Apple a “Strategic Market Status,” or SMS. The CMA plans to lay out a specific set of rules for these SMS’s.
What kinds of rules?
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Search: The rules should ensure news and website owners have more say over how their content is used in AI answers and make search ads clearer for businesses and people. The CMA plans to refine and roll out these measures during early 2026.
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Mobile & app stores: The rules will also make app reviews and rankings more predictable, allowing developers to steer users to pay on the web (not only inside the app) which will improve how their systems exchange information (so, for example, wallets, watches or headsets work properly), and give people more real choice over default services on their phones.
What this means for eCommerce professionals
For eCommerce professionals, this is best understood as a direction of travel rather than an immediate rule change. App-based sellers may, over time, gain more freedom to guide customers towards web checkout and reduce app-store fee exposure. Search-dependent retailers should expect increasing scrutiny of how rankings, ads and AI-generated answers use publisher and retailer content, making clean, well-structured product information more important than ever.
Data & privacy changes (DUAA 2025 flowing into 2026)
The UK passed a new data law in 2025, the Data Use and Access Act (DUAA) and is phasing in the details through 2026. Here are the simple bits that matter for online shops:
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Must have a data‑complaints process.
Every organisation must set up a clear way for people to complain about how their data was/is used. By June 2026 this needs to be in place.
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Cookies & tracking modernised (PECR rules):
Consent is still the default rule, but there’s a new exception that allows service‑improvement analytics without consent, i.e. collecting statistics to make your site better. Advertising/retargeting isn’t listed in these exceptions.
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Bigger penalties and stronger tools for the UK regulator
The UK privacy regulator (the ICO) gets modern enforcement powers, for example, it can require an interview or ask you to commission a technical report during an investigation.
The ICO can now use the same powers and maximum fines for PECR cookie/marketing breaches as for UK GDPR data‑protection breaches, up to £17.5m or 4% of worldwide turnover. Meaning the penalty regime and mechanisms now match in most cases.
What this means for eCommerce professionals
For retailers, the sensible approach is to document clearly what tracking is essential for site improvement, keep consent firmly in place for advertising use cases, and ensure a simple data-complaints route is visible well before the June 2026 deadline.
Wolseley UK Introduces Procurement‑grade checkout with PunchOut + APIs
Away from regulation, a practical example of how B2B eCommerce is evolving comes from Wolseley UK, the plumbing and heating distributor.
Wolseley has invested in APIs and PunchOut integrations that allow trade customers to browse live prices, check stock by branch or distribution centre, and submit orders directly from their own procurement or job-management systems. PunchOut, in this context, means buyers can shop Wolseley’s catalogue from inside platforms such as SAP Ariba or Coupa, then return a completed basket into their internal approval flow without re-keying data.
This approach addresses several long-standing friction points in B2B purchasing: re-ordering without repeated log-ins, avoiding stock surprises late in the checkout, and showing account-specific pricing early rather than at the final step.
What this means for eCommerce professionals
For other B2B retailers, the lesson is not necessarily to replicate the entire technical stack, but to focus on the principles. Clear stock availability where customers collect or receive goods, predictable pricing for logged-in accounts, and integrations that respect how enterprise buyers really buy can all materially improve conversion and retention.
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