Leading multichannel retailers in the United Kingdom (UK) 2020

The United Kingdom has the most dynamic retail e-commerce market in Europe. Over the past five years, e-commerce share in the retail sector of the country saw an increase from 13.5 percent to nearly 18 percent, with projected growth rates for 2019 confirming the continuity of the upward trend. As such, the UK sits at the forefront of not only e-commerce retail but also innovative retail solutions and technologies such as multichannel and omnichannel retailing, the basic tenets of which many UK companies are already employing at a large scale.

Top multichannel retailers

In 2019, UK’s top multichannel retailer was Argos, the catalogue retailer of consumer electronics, homeware and household appliances. Now part of the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, Argos scored 87 out of 100 as a multichannel retailer and secured the leading position among retailers in diverse categories. In the runner-up positions were the furniture retailer B&Q, and the shoe seller Schuh, with scores of 85 and 83 respectively.

‘Clicks and bricks’

Multichannel retail could be defined as a combination of physical and online retail, where retailers offer customers more flexible purchase, delivery, and return options than exclusively online or brick-and-mortar retail does. These include customer experience across a variety of channels such as web and mobile, or last mile operations like click and collect and in-store returns of items bought online. When calculating the multichannel scores of retailers, the source took into consideration the main capabilities associated with such retail technologies currently employed by retailers that sell both online and in-store.