Research
Original reports on UK e-commerce trust.
Data-led studies drawn from Companies House, primary shopper surveys, and checkout research. Free to read, free to cite.
- Companies House
Who really owns UK e-commerce? What Companies House says about 220,000 online retailers
We pulled the live Companies House register for SIC 47910 (Retail sale via mail order houses or via the Internet) and analysed a stratified sample of the beneficial owners. What comes back is not a picture of an established UK trading community. It is a picture of a register dominated by companies less than 24 months old, with a single controlling owner, and often no meaningful UK footprint at all.
≈49%
of active SIC 47910 UK companies incorporated in November 2024 were already marked ‘Active — Proposal to Strike off’ within 13 months of incorporation, in our sample. The register is churning through online-retail companies faster than most shoppers realise.
5 July 202612 min read - Consumer trust
What UK shoppers actually check before buying (and what they don’t)
There is a large gap between what shoppers say they do to verify a site and what they actually do. This report is about that gap, why it matters more than the survey answers, and what the behavioural evidence says trust signals need to do.
Under 4%
of ecommerce visitors typically scroll to a site’s footer during a purchase visit, per aggregate ecommerce eye-tracking observations. Any trust signal that only appears in the footer is invisible to the other 96%.
3 July 20269 min read - Checkout
The five moments UK shoppers decide whether to trust you
Trust anxiety is not constant across a purchase. It spikes at five specific moments in the funnel. Map them, and you can see exactly which trust signals are earning their rent and which are just decorating your site.
48%
of online shoppers who abandon at checkout cite unexpected extra costs as a reason. The single most common cause of cart abandonment in the Baymard Institute dataset.
3 July 202611 min read - Consumer trust
Why third-party verification beats trust copy you wrote yourself
Self-authored trust signals hit a ceiling shoppers can sense in half a second. Third-party verification breaks it. A short paper on the credibility gradient behind every trust signal on the modern web.
19%
of shoppers who abandon an online checkout cite “did not trust the site with card details” as a reason (Baymard Institute, aggregate 2016 to 2023).
3 July 20269 min read