Every November, UK retailers brace for the same spike: traffic surges, ad spend climbs, and the discount codes come out early. Black Friday 2025 followed the script almost perfectly — right up until it came to actually getting paid.
Retailers pushed deeper discounts than ever. Shoppers turned up in force. And yet, for a lot of categories, revenue barely moved. That gap — between people showing up and people actually paying — is exactly the problem we’ve spent the last few months digging into. And what we found is bigger, and stranger, than “shoppers are just being cautious.“
More Discounts, Same Result
IMRG’s Black Friday 2025 review summed the day up bluntly: retailers widened their discounting — the share of items cut by 15% or more rose from 45% to 50% year-on-year — but most categories still declined regardless. Fewer than half of UK shoppers (46%, down from 53% in 2024) even planned to shop during the Black Friday period at all.
Meanwhile, the traffic told a different story. Nationwide payment data showed online transaction volumes up over 10% year-on-year on the day itself, even as high street footfall kept falling. So the demand was there. The websites were busy. The problem wasn’t getting people through the door — it was what happened once they arrived.
We wanted to know exactly where that breakdown happens for UK retailers specifically, so we went through our own Black Friday week tracking data, order by order, category by category. Some of what we found — like which product categories quietly outperformed the “obvious” Black Friday winners — genuinely surprised us.
So Where’s the Money Actually Going?
That’s the question our new whitepaper, Show Me the Money: Why UK eCommerce Has a Paying-Customer Problem, sets out to answer. Without giving too much away, we dug into four places where UK retailers are consistently leaking paying customers:
- The checkout drop-off point almost every retailer accepts as “normal” — and shouldn’t
- The real cost of shipping friction, and how it compares with what shoppers say they’ll tolerate
- Voucher and discount behaviour — whether deeper codes are actually earning loyalty or just training shoppers to wait
- The device gap in how people browse versus how they actually pay
Individually, none of these are new problems. But laid side by side against live UK trading data, the pattern is a lot sharper — and a lot more fixable — than “consumers are just more cautious this year.”
Why This Matters Before Black Friday 2026
Q4 planning is already underway for most operations and marketing teams, and the retailers who win peak this year won’t be the ones offering the deepest discount. Based on what 2025 just showed us, that approach is close to maxed out. The ones who win will be the ones who’ve actually diagnosed where their paying customers are falling away — and fixed it before the traffic spike hits.
That’s what this report is for.
Show Me the Money: Why UK eCommerce Has a Paying-Customer Problem
A Base.com Market Intelligence Report
Inside, you’ll find:
- A full breakdown of where UK shoppers drop out of the buying journey — and why
- Proprietary Black Friday week data across major UK product categories
- Benchmarks from IMRG, ONS, Baymard Institute, BRC-KPMG and YouGov, all in one place
- A practical checklist for shoring up conversion before Black Friday 2026
[Download the full whitepaper →]
Free to download.
