UK Online Retail Spending Up 10.1% Year on Year

The Office for National Statistics publishes Retail sales, Great Britain every month, measuring both the quantity of goods bought (volume) and the amount spent (value) across the retail sector. The August 2026 edition, released on 18 September, reports that sales volumes rose 0.5% over the month, reversing a 0.5% fall in July, and rose 0.9% across the three months to August compared with the three months to May. Measured against August 2025, volumes are up 2.4%.

The online numbers are the more interesting part for anyone selling on the web. Online spending values rose 2.5% over the month against a 1.3% rise in total retail spending across stores and websites combined, so online took a larger slice of a growing pot. That lifted the proportion of sales made online from 28.4% in July to 28.8% in August. The July figure has itself been revised up: when we covered July's retail sales bulletin the share was first published as 28.3%. Over the longer window the gap is wider, with online spending values up 10.1% in the three months to August against the same period in 2025.

Read the value and volume series as two different things. Online performance is reported in value terms, which include price changes, while the headline retail figures quoted in the press are volumes, adjusted for inflation. A 10.1% rise in online spending is therefore not a 10.1% rise in parcels shipped. The ONS also cautions that its non-store retailing category covers more than pure ecommerce, because it includes market stalls and other retailers without a store presence, although online businesses make up the bulk of it. The underlying series sits in the ONS Retail Sales Index internet sales dataset, which splits internet sales by store type, month and year.

The Retail Sales Index is built from the Monthly Business Survey, Retail Sales Inquiry, a survey of retailers across Great Britain. For August 2026 the response rate was 56.7% based on returned forms, 2.8 percentage points below the average of the past 12 months, although those responses accounted for 92.3% of total turnover coverage of the sample population, 5.8 percentage points above average. The sample is thinner than usual by count of businesses but better than usual by value, which matters because large retailers dominate the index. Full detail on strengths and limitations sits in the ONS Retail Sales Index quality and methodology report.

Seasonally adjusted estimates strip out calendar effects, such as Easter moving between March and April, and seasonal effects, such as higher December spending, using the X-13ARIMA-SEATS approach applied at industry level. One change affects anyone comparing against older releases: ahead of the UK National Accounts Blue Book 2026, the index reference period has moved from 2023 equals 100 to 2024 equals 100. Growth rates are unaffected, but index levels quoted from earlier bulletins will not line up. These are accredited official statistics, independently reviewed by the Office for Statistics Regulation.