UK retail data study
PayPal's code loads on more UK home pages than any other payment option measured, while Stripe lost 1.5 percentage points on the same set of sites in a year — a retreat visible in the source code before a shopper sees a single product.
Before a shopper has looked at a single product, a home page has already made a few quiet decisions about money. Tucked into the page source, out of sight, sit small scripts from payment companies, loaded and waiting for the moment someone reaches the basket.
Ask a room of shop owners which of those scripts is everywhere now, and many will glance at the phone in their pocket. The common assumption is that tap-to-pay wallets have pushed the older names off the British checkout.
The code tells a plainer story. Across the .uk home pages crawled in October 2026, PayPal was detected on 8.24%, the highest of the eight payment options measured. These counts cover .uk addresses only, so a British retailer trading on a .com is missing. Detection works by spotting a tool's fingerprint on the home page, so a payment option that only appears deeper in the checkout can be missed. A count of loaded code also says nothing about which button shoppers actually press.
Apple Pay runs second of the eight, a clear step behind
The wallet theory gets one thing right: Apple Pay is firmly in the mix. It was the second most common of the eight options, loading on 6.99% of .uk home pages.
PayPal still keeps a visible lead over it. Think of PayPal as the delivery van of online checkout: nobody photographs it, yet it turns up on more doorsteps than anything newer.
Stripe lost ground on the same 255,116 sites
There is a fair objection to any year-on-year comparison here. The list of sites in the crawl changes from month to month, so a site counted last October may simply be absent this October. A raw rise or fall can partly reflect which sites happened to be crawled.
The answer is to compare like with like: only the 255,116 home pages crawled in both October 2025 and October 2026. On that matched set, Stripe's share fell from 4.21% to 2.69%, a drop of 1.5 percentage points. Because the same pages appear in both years, this move cannot be put down to a reshuffled site list.
payment options on .uk home pages
| Payment option | Share of .uk home pages, Oct 2026 (%) | Same 255,116 pages, Oct 2025 (%) | Same 255,116 pages, Oct 2026 (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| PayPal (highest of the 8 measured) | 8.24 | 8.65 | 8.61 |
| Apple Pay (second of the 8) | 6.99 | 6.94 | 6.97 |
| Shop Pay | 6.72 | 6.74 | 6.75 |
| Google Pay | 5.3 | 5.46 | 5.33 |
| Visa | 5.07 | 5.3 | 5.15 |
| Mastercard | 5.07 | 5.3 | 5.15 |
| American Express | 4.52 | 4.7 | 4.56 |
| Stripe | 2.58 | 4.21 | 2.69 |
| Stripe on the same .uk home pages | Share of home pages (%) |
|---|---|
| October 2025 | 4.21 |
| October 2026 | 2.69 |
| Change (percentage points) | -1.52 |
So the clearest change in a year is a retreat. The figures show where Stripe code went missing. They do not show why, and they do not show what, if anything, replaced it on those pages.
WooCommerce edges Shopify among the eight shop platforms
The shop software underneath these pages gives a sense of scale. WooCommerce was detected on 9.07% of .uk home pages, the most of the eight e-commerce platforms measured, with Shopify second on 8.2%.
e-commerce platforms on .uk home pages
| Platform | Share of .uk home pages, Oct 2026 (%) | Share, Oct 2025 (%) |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce (highest of the 8 measured) | 9.07 | 10.02 |
| Shopify (second of the 8) | 8.2 | 7.3 |
| Wix eCommerce | 3.87 | 3.67 |
| Squarespace Commerce | 3.34 | 3.3 |
| Magento | 0.7 | 0.88 |
| BigCommerce | 0.24 | 0.27 |
| EKM | 0.22 | 0.28 |
| OpenCart | 0.21 | 0.24 |
PayPal's reach sits in the same bracket as the two biggest shop platforms.
A bigger slice of retail now passes through pages like these
The stakes for getting the checkout right have edged up. Online sales made up 28.3% of retail sales value in September 2026, against 27.3% in September 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics. The ONS series covers Great Britain and counts internet sales by all retailers, including high-street chains with websites. Monthly figures are revised in later releases.
Every extra point of that share is spending that reaches a basket on a screen. More of the nation's shopping now meets the code described above.
Open the source of a British shop's home page this autumn and the payment name most likely to turn up is the familiar one. The wallets are there, Stripe is thinning out, and the code that travels furthest is still PayPal's.
What this means for UK businesses
- Know what your home page loads. Payment code can arrive with a theme, an add-on or a platform update. If you no longer offer an option, its script may still be sitting there.
- Don't assume the newest option is the most common. The older names remain widespread on .uk home pages, so shoppers will still expect to see them.
- Recheck after any change of provider. The pages that lost Stripe show that payment set-ups do change. Make sure an old script has actually gone and a new one actually works.
- Treat code as a starting point. What loads on your home page is a technical fact about your site. What your customers prefer comes from your own checkout data.
Analysis compiled by Sayu (sayu.co.uk) from public web-crawl data and ONS retail sales statistics.
How we built it
Technology figures come from the HTTP Archive's October 2026 crawl of .uk home pages, with the October 2025 crawl as the year-ago comparison. The sites crawled are drawn from the Chrome UX Report list of origins. A technology is counted when its fingerprint is detected on the home page. That is a direct detection, so the shares are measured, but each crawl is a point-in-time snapshot. A tool used only on deeper pages can be missed, and UK businesses on .com or other domains are not included.
Shares are of all crawled .uk home pages. This version does not filter to sites with a detected e-commerce platform, and it does not split year-on-year moves by platform. It therefore cannot say whether a change comes from retailers' own choices or from platform defaults.
The crawl's site list changes month to month, so headline year-on-year moves partly reflect which sites were crawled. For that reason, the Stripe change is measured only on the 255,116 home pages present in both October crawls (a matched panel).
Online retail share is the ONS retail sales series J4MC: internet sales by all retailers as a share of total retail sales value, Great Britain. Like months are compared across years. Monthly figures are revised in later releases.
