Digital has been a retail reality for UK shoppers over much of the past year, thanks to lockdown orders requiring nonessential retailers to shutter their physical stores for long periods of time.

The pandemic has greatly affected the distribution of digital ad spending across industries. The bottom fell out of the travel industry, as will ad spending in the sector, while retail will consolidate its dominant position in digital ad spend this year.

With a hard Brexit looming, 2020 will be the peak of cross-border ecommerce penetration in the UK, according to the latest forecast from eMarketer, an Insider Intelligence company. This year, 22.8 million people in the UK will have made a cross-border ecommerce purchase, representing 46.0% of internet users and 50.2% of digital buyers.

This will be a tough year for holiday season retail in the UK. Shoppers will spend less in 2020, and much of their spend will fall outside the traditional November–December time frame, leading to the lowest holiday retail sales total since 2015.

The reports in this collection look at ad spending in the retail, financial services, computing products and consumer electronics, automotive, telecom, travel, health and pharma, media and entertainment, and CPG industries. Countries covered in this report series include the US, UK, and Germany.

When the UK government announced a nationwide lockdown for November, the impetus for retail holiday ecommerce shopping was ratcheted up another notch, given that Black Friday shopping falls within this period.

Digital retail will have a huge impact on UK shopper trends in the coming holiday season. This year, ecommerce will account for nearly a third of all holiday spending, its largest share to date. Brick-and- mortar shopping, meanwhile, remains on the precipice.

The UK is something of a global leader when it comes to retail ecommerce. As a proportion of total retail sales, only China will trump the UK in ecommerce sales penetration this year (41.2% versus 30.9%, respectively). The UK’s fulfillment and delivery infrastructure is, as one would expect, quite mature.

From midnight on March 23, the UK government enforced the closure of nonessential retail stores in the UK as part of strict lockdown measures. This shuttering was only lifted on June 15. During those intervening 12 weeks, UK consumers wanting to purchase anything other than groceries or medications could not do so in-store.

The retail industry will continue to lead the pack in terms of digital ad spend in 2020, and the lockdown has helped retail solidify its position. This year, UK digital ad spending in the retail sector will reach £3.02 billion ($3.85 billion).

Advertisers of consumer packaged goods (CPG) in the UK will spend £2.04 billion ($2.60 billion) on digital ads in 2020, up 6.6% year over year. Any growth is good growth in the current environment, but this will represent the most modest growth across all the industries we forecast to increase spending this year.

The 2019 holiday season capped a tough year for physical retailers in the UK, with brick-and-mortar sales down for the second year running. However, strong gains in retail ecommerce sales meant that overall, retail sales saw growth during the season.

Retail ecommerce sales in Western Europe rose by 26.3% in 2020, to €481.54 billion ($539.18 billion). The pandemic is fueling other shifts in the retail landscape, too, such as a greater focus on buying local.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of consumers from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US said they were more likely to buy a product if they were able to view customer photos and videos, according to a December 2020 survey from Bazaarvoice conducted by Savanta.

And according to SimilarWeb, discretionary spending boosted many D2C firms in the UK during the country’s first lockdown, especially those in the hobbies and lifestyle category. Data from The Direct Selling Association UK in late 2020 found that its member companies had seen average sales growth of 45.5% through the direct channel for the year to date.