Online shops made up nearly one in ten new UK companies

Online retail sits level with software, behind property letting

Property letting was the activity new founders listed most often. Software and IT, at 9.6%, and online retail, at 9.3%, came next and sit almost level, and the gap from that pair down to management consultancy, at 6.1%, is wide. Among the most common business ideas in the UK, selling goods online sits in a tight group of three with renting out homes and building software.

At one decimal place, software and online retail are separated by a few tenths of a point, so the order between them is visible but slim. A few thousand registrations either way would close it. That is why we treat them as level rather than ranking one ahead of the other.

A quarter of new companies share a crowded address

There is an obvious objection to any count of new companies: how many are real businesses? Of the 771,499 companies set up from October 2025 to September 2026 and still on the register, about a quarter share a registered address with 50 or more other new companies.

Those addresses usually belong to formation agents and registered-office services: firms that set up companies in bulk and lend them a postcode. A company registered there may be a genuine shop run from a spare room whose owner simply wanted a business address kept off their front door. It may also be a company created and never used.

The national count of online shops includes companies at those busy addresses, and the register cannot tell us how many of the online retailers sit among them. That makes the headline figure a measure of intent to trade online. It counts the people who filled in the form; it cannot show how many of those shops went on to make a sale. The intent itself is real: founders chose online retail by name, often enough to put it among the most common activities on the list.

Shops and wholesalers form the biggest industry group

Look at the first activity each company gave, sorted into broad industry groups, and the trade sector comes out on top. Wholesale and retail accounted for about one in five new companies, the largest group. Information and communication came second, and property third.

This view counts differently from the activity list above. It uses only the first code a company gave, and the wholesale and retail group takes in high-street shops, market traders and wholesalers as well as online sellers. The two figures should be kept apart: online retail is one strand within a much broader trading group.

Online's share of what Britain spends in shops

The national retail figures help explain why so many founders start online. Internet sales made up 27.3% of retail sales by value in Great Britain in August 2026, according to the Office for National Statistics. That ONS figure counts online sales by every retailer, including big chains with physical stores, so it measures how shoppers pay rather than how many online-only firms exist. Monthly figures are also revised in later releases.

Put together, the picture is of a shopping public that already spends a large part of its retail money online, and a steady stream of new companies registering to sell to it.

What this means for UK businesses

• Expect company. Online retail is one of the most common choices among new founders, so a new shop opens into a crowded field from the first day. Competing on the basics (speed, clear product information, a simple checkout) matters more than a clever name.
• Your activity code is a choice, and a public one. Registration records what you intend to do. Pick codes that describe the business accurately, because they form part of your public record.
• Registering is the first step only. Many new companies sit at shared formation-agent addresses and the register cannot show which of them trade. A registered company and a working shop are different milestones; plan for the second. A new shop has to give buyers a clear reason to choose it over a name they already know.

How we built it

The new-company figures come from the Companies House register snapshot (Basic Company Data, released under the Open Government Licence) taken at 1 October 2026. They cover companies incorporated from October 2025 to September 2026 that were still registered at that date. These are measured counts of the register, so no sampling is involved, but dissolved companies are missing, which makes every figure a slight undercount.

Activities come from the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes each company gave when it registered. "Online retail" means the code for retail sale via mail order houses or the internet (SIC 47910). The activity shares count a company under any of its up to four codes, so they overlap and do not add to 100%. The industry-group shares use only the first code, so each company appears once.

A "mass-registration address" is a postcode shared by 50 or more companies incorporated in the period. These companies are included in the national totals above. The online retail count could not be split by address type, so the share of online shops at those addresses is unknown.

Online's share of retail is ONS series J4MC: internet sales by all retailers as a share of total retail sales value in Great Britain. It is an official survey-based estimate, revised in later releases, and like months should be compared across years. We do not claim any link between the national online share and the number of new online companies; the two sit side by side as context.

Copy-ready data table