Small businesses in the UK are falling behind larger ones in making online sales, finds a new study of government data by digital marketing agency Koozai.

The study, which analysed the latest datasets on the ecommerce activity of UK businesses from the Office of National Statistics, found that just 23% of small businesses (with 249 employees or less) are making sales online – compared to nearly 60% of large businesses (with 1,000 or more employees). This comes despite the value of ecommerce sales in the UK having risen by between £6.9 and £16.3 billion every year since 2015.

The latest figures also show a 13.12% year-on-year drop in the value of online sales for smaller businesses, compared to a 11.8% year-on-year increase in online sales for large businesses. More than 1 in 4 (28.44%) small businesses do not even have a website, compared to only 3.1% of large businesses.

The study also shows that the extent to which businesses are embracing ecommerce differs by industry. Retail has the largest proportion of businesses that make sales online (48.3%), compared to just 5.5% of construction businesses. However, the proportion of businesses making online sales fell slightly year-on-year in every sector, except for the wholesale industry, which experienced a 5.8% increase in businesses making sales online.

Wholesale businesses are making most money from online sales (90.6 billion) each year, compared to £45.7 billion for retail businesses and just £2.3 billion for construction businesses.

Few small businesses are also using ‘big data’ to make strategic decisions. Just 7.3% of small businesses are using geolocation data from portable devices (such as targeted ads), comparted to 26.3% of large businesses. Only 11.83% of small businesses use data from social media to make, compared to a third (33.2%) of large businesses.

Koozai Owner & Director Sophie Roberts said: “The data clearly shows that smaller businesses are failing to make inroads when it comes to generating revenue online. Part of this will be due to higher set up costs and fewer resources, however it can also come down to mindset. There are inexpensive ways for small businesses to optimise their website for sales traffic from search engines like Google, however many either just aren’t aware of the opportunity or believe the barriers to entry are higher than is actually the case.”