Updated 9 November 2026.
Key takeaways
- Productivity is output per hour (or per worker). The ONS says UK output per hour grew 0.7% in the year to April to June 2026 on its preferred payroll-based measure, and fell 0.2% on its survey-based measure.
- Most productivity talk is about making things. Selling is the other half, and it is where ecommerce can automate orders, stock, pricing and reporting.
- Online selling is established: in September 2026, 28.8% of Great Britain's retail sales were made online (ONS). The question is how much of the work behind those sales is still manual.
- Practical wins come from three things: automation, system integrations and dashboards that show profit, not just sales.
What productivity means
Productivity measures how much output you get for each input. For a country, the ONS measures output per hour worked and output per worker. For a business, the same idea applies: how much profitable revenue does each person, hour or pound of cost produce?
Our original argument, first written in 2019, still holds: a business has two jobs, making or buying things, and selling them. Productivity in making alone fills the warehouse but empties the bank. You only make money when you sell what you have made.
Where UK productivity stands
The ONS published its latest productivity estimates on 18 August 2026, for April to June 2026. Compared with the same quarter a year earlier:
| Measure (ONS, Q2 2026 v Q2 2025) | Output per hour | Output per worker |
|---|---|---|
| Payroll-based (RTI) | +0.7% | +1.4% |
| Survey-based (LFS) | -0.2% | +0.4% |
The ONS recommends the payroll-based measure and says its survey-based figures are temporarily lower. Against the 2019 average, output per hour is 4.6% higher on the payroll-based measure and 2.3% higher on the survey-based measure. The ONS describes growth as subdued compared with the trends seen before the 2008 financial crisis.
In short, growth is modest. For a business, that is the argument for finding gains in your own operations rather than waiting for the national numbers to change.
Why selling is the overlooked half
Many productivity programmes focus on production. But the sales side has plenty of repetitive work too: updating stock and prices, listing products on channels, processing orders, answering "where is my order?", and building reports by hand.
Ecommerce lets you automate much of that. The scale of online selling shows the opportunity:
- Great Britain retail, September 2026: 28.8% of retail sales were made online (ONS Retail sales). This is a retail-only measure.
- EU-27 businesses, sales made in 2024: 23.59% of enterprises with 10 or more employees made e-sales, and e-sales were 19.49% of their turnover, including 8.39% from web sales (Eurostat).
- UK businesses, 2019: £334.9 billion of website sales by non-financial businesses with 10 or more employees (ONS, the latest business edition).
These are three different measures. We give them to show that online selling is now ordinary, not to compare them with each other.
Three practical ways to improve productivity in ecommerce
1. Automate the repeated tasks
Look for any task someone does more than a few times a week: price updates, stock feeds to marketplaces, order status emails, supplier file imports and low-stock alerts. If the rules are clear, a system can do it, and it will not miss one at 2am. Selling in other time zones is a good example, because orders arrive while your team is asleep. Automation means the order, the stock update and the confirmation all happen without anyone being there.
2. Integrate your systems
Productivity drops where one system does not talk to another: someone re-keys orders from the website into the accounts package, or copies stock levels from a spreadsheet. Integrating your website, marketplaces, stock or ERP system, accounts and email platform removes the re-keying and the errors that come with it. Start with the handoff that costs the most time.
3. Measure with dashboards, not spreadsheets
If building the weekly report takes half a day, that half day is lost every week. A dashboard that pulls sales, margin, advertising cost and stock into one view makes decisions faster, and lets you see which products and channels actually make profit. Our ecommerce dashboards are built for exactly that.
A simple way to start
- List the five most repeated manual tasks in your sales process.
- Estimate roughly how many hours each takes per week. Use your own numbers.
- Pick the one that is most repetitive and has clear rules. Automate or integrate it first.
- Put the key numbers (revenue, margin, ad spend, stock) into one dashboard so you can see whether it helped.
Frequently asked questions
What is productivity in business?
Output compared with the inputs used to produce it, such as revenue or profit per hour worked. The ONS measures national productivity as output per hour worked and output per worker.
How fast is UK productivity growing?
On the ONS's preferred payroll-based measure, output per hour was 0.7% higher in April to June 2026 than a year earlier. On its survey-based measure it was 0.2% lower.
How does ecommerce improve productivity?
By automating tasks such as listings, stock and price updates, order processing and reporting, so fewer hours go into each sale.
What should I automate first?
The most repeated manual task with clear rules, such as stock or price updates between your website and marketplaces.
How do dashboards help?
They bring sales, margin, advertising spend and stock into one view, so you spend time on decisions instead of building reports.
