UK online retail sales broke records in July topping £10 billion for the first time as shoppers continued to shun the high street despite lockdown ending.
Ecommerce sales last month were both the highest seen this year and the highest on record for July, according to the latest figures from Adobe.
This helped digital spend for the year-to-date jump 18 per cent to £64 billion year-on-year, and 56 per cent compared to pre-pandemic spend in 2019.
Adobe says this boost was partially down to a combination of continued reluctance to shop in physical stores and a back-to-work spending boost.
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According to a survey of 1000 UK consumers, 40 per cent said they would still actively avoid in-store shopping while 56 per cent planned to avoid high streets all together.
Meanwhile the easing of work from home guidance saw around 40 per cent of respondents return to the office full-time, and a third of those purchasing new clothes driving sales for work attire up 200 per cent during the six-week period to the end of July.
However, the report also revealed that online inflation was continuing to rise after years of stagnation, jumping 2.8 per cent in July.
This was an increase on June’s 2.3 per cent which marked a sharp turnaround in online price inflation, which dropped an average of 3.9 per cent every year from 2015 to 2019.
“While offline inflation has continued to increase since 2016, online prices only started to increase since the start of the pandemic,” Adobe said.
