John Cuthbert 
Retailers have just told the CBI that online retail sales fell faster in September than at any point in almost three years. The official figures say online retail sales were still growing in August. Both are true, and the gap between them is the most useful thing a retailer can understand going into peak.
What the CBI survey says about online retail sales
The CBI’s Distributive Trades Survey, published on 24 September, asks retailers whether their sales volumes are up or down on a year ago. The headline numbers are balances: the share of retailers reporting a rise minus the share reporting a fall. They are not percentage falls in sales, but they are a reliable read on direction and mood.
September’s readings were stark:
- Online sales: −68%, down from −43% in August and the fastest reported decline since October 2023.
- Overall retail sales: −55%, down from −48%.
- Orders placed with suppliers: −62%, down from −29% and the weakest balance since the survey began in 1983.
- October expectations: retailers expect online sales and orders to keep falling at a similar pace.
Martin Sartorius, Lead Economist at the CBI, said some firms attributed the deterioration to poor consumer sentiment.
Why the official data looks better
The ONS retail sales release for August, published on 18 September, tells a calmer story. Online sales values were 8.9% higher than a year earlier, and online accounted for 28.8% of all retail sales.
There are three reasons these don’t contradict each other. The ONS figures run to August, while the CBI survey covers September. ONS online figures are values, so price rises flatter them. And the CBI measures how many retailers are struggling, not how much money changed hands.
Consumer sentiment adds a twist. GfK’s September index rose to −13, its highest since August 2024, yet its Savings Index rose while its Major Purchase Index fell. People feel a little better and are choosing to save rather than spend.
What retailers are doing about it
The most telling number is orders. Retailers are cutting what they buy from suppliers at the fastest rate the CBI has ever recorded, going into the quarter that matters most. That’s a defensive stance: carry less stock, commit less cash, wait and see.
The same logic applies to technology spending. In a quarter like this, a replatform or redesign is a hard sell. Protecting the revenue you already have is not.
Where peak revenue quietly leaks
When demand is soft, every lost order hurts more. The losses that matter most at peak are rarely dramatic outages; they are small failures repeated thousands of times. With Black Friday on 27 November, there are around eight weeks to find them.
1. Checkout and payment errors. Check your payment gateway and application logs for declined, errored and abandoned payment attempts now, not in November. A failure rate that looks tolerable in September becomes expensive on your busiest day. When we cut application errors by 95% for a UK outdoor clothing retailer, most of what we fixed had been invisible to the team until we measured it.
2. Stock and availability data. Cutting orders means thinner stock, which makes overselling more likely. If your storefront gets stock levels from an ERP or warehouse system on a slow schedule, customers can buy items you no longer have. Check how often stock syncs, and what happens when a sync fails.
3. Promotions. Discount rules that stack unexpectedly, expire at the wrong time or apply to the wrong products cost margin you can’t afford this year. Test every planned promotion on staging with real basket combinations before it goes live.
4. Performance under load. Slow pages lose sales even when nothing is technically broken. Load-test your key journeys, and check third-party scripts, which are often the slowest part of a product page and the least tested.
5. Monitoring and rollback. Agree a change freeze window, make sure every deployment can be rolled back in minutes, and make sure alerts reach someone who can act on them. The worst time to discover your monitoring doesn’t work is during a peak-day incident.
Spend where it pays back this quarter
None of this needs a new platform. It needs someone to look properly at the systems you already run: logs, integrations, promotion rules and deployment process. The payback is measured in orders you don’t lose over the next eight weeks.
If you want a second pair of senior eyes on your peak readiness, our Technical Support service covers monitoring and incident response, System Integration fixes the stock and order flows between your systems, and a Development Retainer gives you a fixed monthly budget for the fixes that surface. Book a call and we’ll tell you honestly where we’d start.
Sources: CBI Distributive Trades Survey, September 2026; ONS Retail sales, Great Britain: August 2026; GfK Consumer Confidence, September 2026.
