Recent reports have suggested that online sales have been the saving grace of weak UK retail sales overall in the past few months. But Adobe Digital Insights data on Tuesday seems to contradict that.
Its online spending report for June also shows e-spending reached £49.7 billion in the first half of the year overall, just a 1.6% year-on-year increase, with May and June both unimpressve. May was actually down 1.2% and while June (or more accurately, June 1-25) was up, it only rose 1.4%, well behind the inflation rate.
Adobe said low consumer confidence, offline inflation, rising household costs and economic uncertainty “saw consumers respond by buying fewer full-priced items, and substituting their regular items for cheaper alternatives”.
It raises the stakes for Amazon’s Prime Day this month with major discounting days (or four days intros case) such as this being key spending events. And its not just those selling via Amazon that could benefit as other retailers respond with their own promotional events as the July clearance sales period continues.
So let’s look at June spending in a bit more detail. We’re told UK consumers spent £7.5 billion online in the period and while the overall annual rise of 1.4% wasn’t anything to write home about, some categories saw healthy growth.
On the ‘explosive growth’ list were video games leaping 94% due to the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, while gift cards rose 52% helped by Father’s Day, and barbecues 42% (not surprising given the unexpectedly warm weather).
There was also good news for jewellery, which was up 20%, and clothing that rose a healthy 8%. That clothing figure does tally with other reports that have suggested fashion sales were strong online in recent weeks, although it’s unclear so far how much of this was at full price and how it will impact profits for the year as a whole.
Interestingly, Adobe also said that retail is “on the cusp of a GenAI revolution” as shoppers using and trusting AI assistants is on the rise. Compared with August 2024, traffic to retail websites from AI tools in June 2025 was up 1,200%, “as consumers increasingly use the services to compare prices, compile shopping lists and research products”.
That’s important for a number of reasons, the key one of which is that “AI-sourced traffic is high value”. When landing on retail pages from AI-sources, “shoppers spend 23% longer on-site” than those who arrive directly, from social media sources or from traditional search.
And AI-sourced conversion rates “are surging as consumers use services as personal shoppers”. Conversion rates from AI sourced traffic have grown by 100% between April 2025 and June 2025 showing higher levels of consumer trust in the results from AI-search and highlighting the importance for online retailers to feature in the responses and links that AI search engines like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Perplexity and others return to users.
Not that AI use is universal just yet but it’s growing fast and as recently as last October, the picture was very different. The conversion rate from non-AI sourced traffic back then was 89% higher than the conversion rate from AI-sourced traffic. But last month the conversion rate from non-AI sourced traffic was only 38% higher than AI-sourced traffic “showing the increasing trust and use of AI and GenAI search as personal shoppers”. It all suggests that we’re not far off from the two sources reaching parity and then AI-sourced traffic moving into the lead.
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