Can We Now Have More Confidence in the eCommerce Market?
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A few months’ ago, in this very series, I posited the idea that eCommerce might be making a bit of a comeback following years in the growth wilderness. The early weeks of the year were all positive for revenue growth, but this was against some quite strong declines for the same period in 2024, so any suggestion that it might be returning to something more reliably positive felt rather tentative.
Here we are though with a few more weeks under 2025’s belt, taking us up to almost a third of the year done, and a strange vision has been popping its head above the waves without sinking straight back down and drowning again moments later; confidence.
This is one of those moments where you almost don’t want to say it out loud, lest it curses the recovery, but the revenue growth line in the below chart from the start of this year has been very solid and reliable compared to where it was in the year previous. In 2024 it was rare to see even two consecutive weeks above the base line, let alone 13 of the first 15.
And those two weeks of negative growth are not the cause for concern that they may first appear. Every year there are significant retail events that move in the calendar, with Mothers’ Day and Easter being two of the major ones. Both of those went back in the calendar by almost three weeks this year compared to 2024, so the decline for growth in March 2025 was actually due to the weeks leading up to Mothers’ Day not aligning and showing a skewed like-for-like.
Likewise, the final week on the graph shows where Easter moved, so the promotional activity that accompanies it produced growth of over 11%; crucially though, the weeks before that when we might have expected a negative impact due to the non-date alignment of Easter did not show a notable decline. This means that, on balance, Easter trading seems to have been pretty good.
To quantify how good trade has been thus far, our forecast for revenue growth in 2025 was +1%; year-to-date, it is running at +2.9%. It is early days still and there is a lot of ground to cover, but you can’t help but feel encouraged by the start the market has made.
Category Winners and Losers: A Mixed Bag Beneath the Surface
It’s not been across all categories the same though. Health & beauty has been buoyant for 18 months now and continues to perform very well, with fragrance a particular standout. Home & garden has been positive for most of 2025 to date, with furniture doing well and garden benefitting from the sunny weather. Electrical has seen some sub-categories selling well while other struggled, but overall it has been more up than down. Pre-orders for the Nintendo Switch 2 seem to have boosted gaming and computing.
On the other side, gifts has been the worst-hit category for a number of years now but even this one has just seen five weeks of consecutive growth for the first time since 2021. Clothing is experiencing the toughest conditions however, with only footwear seeing more positive growth than negative while womenswear and menswear have hardly seen any positive growth all year. The real reasons may be multiple and complex, but it does feel like Vinted might be exerting a good deal of influence here.
It can all turn around, it’s quite possible that the global economy falls into recession this year and the UK might have to navigate a difficult period, but there’s no denying that the ecommerce market is appearing more resilient and reliable than it has done in a long time.
Looking at the above graph, there are plenty of times over the coming months where we will be comparing against negative growth from last year, making it easier and more likely that we can secure growth against those periods. There are some positive weeks to come up against too, so it won’t be growth all the way through and Black Friday did pretty well last year so we won’t stay at +2.9% until the end of the year.
Still, it’s nice to have a buffer. Now that’s confidence for you.
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