Home Blog Sales Selling to eCommerceTop 100 UK Ecommerce Companies: Powerhouses and Challengers

Top 100 UK Ecommerce Companies: Powerhouses and Challengers

by Madeleine Chill , Content Marketing Manager 12Min.

February 15, 2023 | Updated September 20, 2023

Every day, a plethora of new ecommerce companies hit the digital world. It’s a lot to keep up with for anyone, but especially if you’re a B2B sales team — where does one even begin?

I’ll tell you where: right here, with our definitive list of the UK’s top 50 ecommerce companies. Plus scoot a little farther down the page for a list of the 50 fastest-growing ecommerce businesses in the UK. Talk about a one-stop shop.

UK ecommerce companies not what you want? We’ve got a (regularly updated) list for thetop 50 US andtop 50 global ecommerce companies, too.

Some common themes of the top UK ecommerce companies from our May 2023 data include:

The usual suspects turned up (with one little rank swap)

Home and garden didn’t miss a beet

The apparel industry rolled up its sleeves

Telecom kept calm and carried on

Health and fitness flexed their traffic

Top UK ecommerce companies list

If you fancy a sneak peek of the top ecommerce companies in the UK, you’re in luck. We’ve got the top 15 right here:

The criteria used to create this top 50 list of UK ecommerce companies (so you can do it too with Similarweb Sales Intelligence) were:

Geography: UK traffic only
Website Type: Ecommerce
Ranked by monthly desktop and mobile visits for May 2023

Download the full list of top 50 ecommerce companies in the UK:

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We’re about to take you through some details on the top 5 companies, including technographics, company info, performance, and competitive landscape. Successful consultative selling thrives on this kind of data and insights — so take notes!

A deeper dive into the top 5 UK ecommerce companies

1) Amazon.co.uk

Coming in first with a casual 301 million visits in May 2023 is a small, indie brand that you probably haven’t heard of… JK, it’s ecommerce giant and industry leader, Amazon.

UK visitors are clearly leaning on amazon.co.uk for all their essentials, not to mention the next-day delivery and exclusive shows. And our stats prove it: the word “prime” shows up five times in the site’s top 15 traffic-driving keywords.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows for Amazon UK. In fact, its visits are down over 7% year-over-year (YoY) when we compare May 2023 to May 2022, and have consistently failed to reach YoY growth.

There are a number of factors that could be causing this drop in visits. For instance, macro economic trends are causing a general ecommerce traffic downturn in the UK, plus Amazon is dealing with ongoing worker disputes.

In positive news for amazon.co.uk, however, its pages per visit are up both month-over-month (MoM) and YoY. Of course, May can’t beat the holiday surge in November and December, but still — it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Here are just a few of the website technologies that amazon.co.uk uses to get where it is today:

Apple Pay: A payment service from tech giant Apple
WooCommerce: WordPress’s ecommerce plugin
Ströer: Marketing and content curation

2) eBay.co.uk

Just another small, mom-and-pop ecommerce shop… eBay. Heard of it? This multinational ecommerce leader — a one-stop-shop for almost any product on earth, old or new — is an undeniable hit in the UK, with 214.9 million website visits in May 2023 alone.

While its monthly or yearly traffic can’t compete with that of Amazon’s UK site, eBay does take the cake on a number of crucial engagement metrics, including a higher visit duration time (09:23 to Amazon’s 06:42) and a lower bounce rate (27.54% to Amazon’s 32.39%).

This could signal a bunch of things: a slightly better UX, more or higher quality products, or just that eBay’s users love digital window shopping.

Finally, let’s check how many of eBay’s UK visitors are also patronizing amazon.co.uk — and vice versa.

A whopping +43% of ebay.co.uk’s visitors also poked around Amazon’s UK site, while only 20.7% of Amazon’s UK visitors paid eBay a visit. The ecommerce rivalry continues…

Here are just three of ebay.co.uk’s many website technologies:

Squarespace Commerce: Web design mainstay Squarespace’s ecommerce plugin
Criteo: An advertising retargeting tool
Digicert: A privacy & encryption tool

3) Etsy.com

Upset alert! Etsy has officially ousted Argos.co.uk for third place — at least for now — with 44.1M UK visits in May 2023.

With just under 9% of its total monthly traffic coming from the United Kingdom, Etsy’s positioning as a global online marketplace is clearly no lie — the love of independent brands and unique gifts is an international trend.

But where’s all that UK traffic coming from? Ah yes, yet another thing our data can reveal for you. Unsurprisingly, organic search is Etsy’s main way of bringing in traffic, with direct traffic close behind.

Social media is also key for Etsy, with almost 8% of its traffic coming from social channels. This is no surprise since many independent retailers use social media to market their products.

You can even see this reflected in Etsy’s top referring websites, where Linktree, a platform that allows people to create a unified link in bio on their social media profile, drove 1.1M visits in the past 12 months alone. Etsy sellers on Instagram: keep up the good work. (Also, hello again, Amazon and eBay.)

4) Argos.co.uk

Up next, we’ve got British catalog retailer Argos, whose smart swerve to online shopping has certainly paid off.

With 43 million visits in May 2023, it’s right behind Etsy, and the two sites’ competitive traffic trend over time is very… well, competitive.

Even though argo.co.uk won on total traffic in the past 12 months, etsy.com was able to stay stable after the winter holiday bump, while argo.co.uk dipped drastically in February 2023 after the winter holidays — and has yet to fully recover.

In terms of audience demographics, Argo’s got a very equal gender split and a somewhat young-leaning age spread. But no matter your age, it’s hard not to love the convenience factor of this online catalog.

What website technologies does argos.co.uk use? Here’s a sneak peek:

ForeSee: Conversion and analytics
ProofPoint: Cybersecurity tool
Tealium: Tag management

5) Next.co.uk

Next in line is… Next. And guess what — according to Similarweb’s Digital Research Intelligence platform, Next is the industry leader for UK fashion and apparel, taking the top spot above the likes of Marks and Spencer, ASOS, and the rapidly growing Shein.

Next.co.uk saw a total of 31.6 million visits in May 2023, with an estimated 11M unique visitors. Where else are these Next visitors popping in online? Let’s check next.co.uk’s audience interests to find out just that.

Lots of fan fashion favorites here, and marksandspencer.com is at the front of the pack with over 16% cross-visitation with Next’s site, closely followed by johnlewis.com and asos.com.

Let’s put these four close competitors together and compare engagement metrics to see who’s winning what beyond sheer traffic.

Whoa — Next really does reign supreme in this competitive set. The only two spots it’s losing are to ASOS in visit duration and bounce rate, and in both cases, Next is just barely behind. It seems congratulations are in order.

Top UK fastest-growing ecommerce companies list

Now, we present to you our exclusive list of the UK’s fastest-growing ecommerce companies for May 2023. Here are the top 15 as a taster:

The criteria used to create this list were:

Geography: UK traffic only
Website Type: Ecommerce
Website Technologies: Ecommerce
Monthly visits: Over 250,000 from the UK
Desktop and mobile traffic
Ranked by monthly visits increase, April 2023 versus May 2023

Download the full list of the top 50 fastest-growing ecommerce companies in the UK:

Download your list of the top 50 fastest-growing ecommerce companies

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A deeper dive into the top 5 fastest-growing UK ecommerce companies

Now, let’s take a deeper dive into the five fastest-growing companies in the UK — and the factors that have driven their growth.

Exploring even these five ecommerce companies will show you how much the nature of the industry is changing all the time.

Just look at number 1 on the list; a brand-new player ecommerce marketplace, which is already winning a huge market share in the UK.

Want to see if you’ve been an economic contributor to one (or more) of the top 50 fastest-growing ecommerce companies? Read on — and make sure you download that full list, too.

1) Temu.com

Say hello to the new kid on the ecommerce marketplace block: Temu. Since the site’s US launch in September 2022, it’s been expanding globally at a breakneck pace, racking up an impressive 680.4 million worldwide visits.

Temu launched in the UK in April 2023, and since then its traffic has been through the roof. With 24.1M UK visits in May 2023 alone, the site’s UK traffic grew a whopping 631% month-over-month (MoM).

With its bargain-basement prices and legal controversies, Temu has often been compared to Shein, another explosively popular ecommerce marketplace. Let’s see how these two brands stack up to each other on the digital front.

Would you look at that? Within a few days, Temu went from UK obscurity to overtaking shein.co.uk’s daily UK visits. Digging into engagement metrics, however, Shein’s still dominating:

The only place Temu’s winning here is bounce rate, and even that’s not by much. Shein has yet to be outperformed in terms of web stickiness — just look at those visit duration and pages per visit metrics.

App-wise, though, Temu’s showing itself to be a true challenger. In the UK, Temu’s iOS app has topped the charts for over a month now. We know we’ll be staying tuned to see how this rivalry develops…

Here are some of the website technologies Temu’s using as it expands:

Facebook Domain Insights: A conversion & analytics tool
Google Adsense: Google’s ad-serving application
Shopify: An ecommerce platform

2) Lutontown.co.uk

Football fans — this one’s for you.

The next big hit for May 2023 is not what we’d traditionally call an ecommerce company, but that just goes to show that rules are made to be broken. Luton Town F.C.’s official website scored an impressive 416% growth MoM, and over 456K monthly visits.

And here’s where ecommerce comes in: lutontown.co.uk’s ecommerce store subdomain, shop.lutontown.co.uk, brought in over 84K of those visits — or in other words, over 18% of Luton Town’s total monthly traffic in the UK.

See that mid-month traffic spike? May was a thrilling month for the football squad’s fan base, and the data don’t lie. After a whirlwind season and 14-game win streak, underdog Luton beat Sunderland on May 16, 2023, securing their spot in a late-May match that culminated in Luton Town’s triumphant return to the Premier League after a 31-year absence.

The excitement was palpable in the stands and online, both in the UK and beyond. In fact, the US contributed over 9.5% of lutontown.co.uk’s total global traffic, and US visitors had a much lower bounce rate than UK visitors did (38% versus 46%).

Back to the UK, let’s take a closer look at who all these new lutontown.co.uk visitors are by exploring audience demographics.

In May 2023, site traffic was over 73% male, and 30% of visitors were between the ages 25 and 34 — which accords with what we know about UK football viewership.

Finally, let’s check out where visitors are heading from the Luton Town F.C. site, AKA its outgoing referrals for May 2023.

To sum up its outgoing referrals: get your tickets, fans. Go Hatters!

3) Wiggle.com

And the award for cutest URL goes to…

Oh, whoops, wrong blog post. Coming in at third fastest-growing ecommerce company in the UK for May 2023: wiggle.com.

This sport and athletic gear retailer’s been around for a while, and until recently, they were bringing in a respectable monthly average of around 67K monthly UK visitors.

That all changed in April 2023, when their monthly visits spiked suddenly to over 364K, and then rocketed to almost 1.5 million visits in May 2023.

This hefty 309% growth MoM must have come from somewhere. Don’t worry, readers — we’re on the case.

Let’s start by checking out their marketing channel spread using Similarweb Sales Intelligence.

See those pink peaks in the bottom right corner of the graph? That’s wiggle.com’s paid search traffic suddenly spiking early in 2023 after years of PPC silence. That’ll certainly bring in some new traffic!

But Wiggle didn’t just throw some money into ads and leave it at that — in April 2023, the company underwent a complete rebrand, introducing a fresh design and a streamlined site.

Out of curiosity, let’s see which non-branded search terms are driving the most traffic to wiggle.com these days…

And finally, here are a few of the website technologies wiggle.com installed during its recent meteoric rise:

Metapack: An ecommerce shipping and delivery management tool
Adyen: An omnichannel payments solution
Klarna: A buy-now-pay-later payment provider

4) Quickjacklift.co.uk

Our next rising star is QuickJack, a company that sells portable car lifts. Quickjacklift.co.uk saw an impressive 171% traffic growth MoM in May 2023.

That graph’s pretty wild, isn’t it? Let’s dig into quickjacklift.co.uk’s online performance and see if we can’t find out where that spike came from.

Organic search (light blue) is driving the most traffic by far, but social is also driving a surprising amount. Taking a closer look at QuickJack’s social spread, it looks like Youtube is its social platform of choice.

And if you head over to their Youtube channel to take a look, you’ll find some pretty impressive view counts.

Clearly, QuickJack’s doing something right.

And for your sneak peek into its website technologies…

reCAPTCHA: An anti-bot mainstay
FedEx: A shipping provider
Magento 2: An ecommerce platform

5) Littlegreenradicals.com

Coming in fresh at number five: Little Green Radicals. This UK-based ecommerce brand specializes in organic and sustainable clothes for babies and kids — but its recent growth has actually been more paid than organic. (Wink wink.)

The site saw a 142% MoM increase in traffic in May 2023, and we’re here to figure out how.

As alluded to above, it seems that paid search has been a big contributor to this recent growth. So far in 2023, the site’s main traffic channels by far are direct and paid search.

Let’s take a look at a few of the search ads Little Green Radicals is using to win that traffic:

Ad copy looking good, LGR. And with those numbers, it seems we aren’t the only ones who think so. Stay radical

Why all this data is (or should be) so important to you

What does all this have to do with you and your sales team? This Similarweb data helps you:

Stay in the know about which ecommerce companies are getting the most traffic.
Spot up-and-coming ecommerce names that have just made it into the top 50.
Sharpen your expertise in the ecommerce space, so you know really what you’re talking about when it comes to prospects and customers.

Our insights don’t stop there. With over 100 million companies and their data listed on Similarweb (and way more than just ecommerce, too), you can easily get your hands on the data you need to catapult you and your sales team to closed-won-ville.

If pulling accurate insights about leads and prospects like these ones sounds up your street, Similarweb Sales Intelligence is the platform for you. It’s easy to use, it’s quick, and it’ll help you smash your sales quota.

Get in touch today to find out how Similarweb Sales Intelligence can get you the right leads, at the right time, with the right insights to close the deal.

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FAQs

Which is the biggest ecommerce company in the UK?

Amazon.co.uk remains the top ecommerce company in the UK with 301 million website visits in May 2023. Amazon is followed (reasonably) closely by ebay.co.uk with 214.9 million website visits.

What is the largest ecommerce company?

With our top 50 list of ecommerce companies in the UK, you’ll see Amazon crop up a few times. So, it comes as no surprise that Amazon reigns as the top ecommerce company around the world.

How big is the UK ecommerce market?

Despite its small geographic size, the United Kingdom is the third largest market for ecommerce, following China and the United States.