When it comes to the question of which marketing channel has the best ROI for eCommerce in the UK, or even which is best for eCommerce, there’s no one answer for everyone. Although not every channel will work for every brand, there’s a framework you can follow to work out the right channels for you and where to invest the most. This helps you make the right decisions based on where your brand is in its growth cycle, what your margins look like and how much customer data you already have.
Why is there no single best channel for eCommerce?
If you’re looking for the best eCommerce marketing channels in 2026, you’ll soon find out that it’s all dependent on what you need. For example, a Shopify brand with £50000 per month in revenue and no email list faces a completely different decision from one with £500000 per month in revenue and a 30000-subscriber email list. The channel that gives you the best return just depends on where you are and not where anyone else is.
To find the best channel for your eCommerce business, you need to carry out channel sequencing. You should start with what you know generates demand, which is search, and then add what converts your existing intent, which is SEO and email. Once you’ve done this, you need to scale what creates new demand, which is social media and influencers. Doing the sequence rather than running all the channels from the first day with a limited budget will help you gain better results for all of them.
Google Shopping is the highest-intent eCommerce channel
In our eCommerce marketing channel comparison, Google Shopping remains the most consistent ROI channel for most eCommerce brands because it catches purchase intent at the moment of search. This is because someone who’s searching for women’s running shoes or something specific and then clicks on a Shopping ad they’ve already decided that they want to buy the item. This means that Google Shopping is a channel that converts existing demand rather than creating new demand, which means that it offers the most predictable return.
A limitation with this channel is that the quality of your ads depends on your feed quality. Brands that have strong product feeds and structured campaigns will typically achieve a blended ROAS of 3x to 6x. However, for brands with low-quality feeds and broad match keywords, these will often only see 1.5x or less. This makes these brands assume that Shopping doesn’t work for them, but if they work on improving their feed quality, then the channel can improve and work for them.
In most eCommerce categories, Google Shopping has the highest purchase intent of any paid channel. Investing in feed quality before bidding strategy is the most reliable path to improving Shopping ROI.
Email is the most profitable channel that most brands don’t invest in
One of the greatest eCommerce advertising options for UK brands is email. This is a channel that is usually forgotten about and not invested in because many brands think it doesn’t do much, but it does when you regularly communicate with customers. Email can give the highest ROAS of any eCommerce marketing channel since the list has opted in to receive communications. As well as this, the marginal cost per send is near zero, and you own the data regardless of what happens on ad platforms.
For many Shopify brands that don’t have an organised email structure that brings them 25 to 35 percent of their total revenue, they face at least one of three issues. They have a small list, which is fixable, broken flows that can be fixed in a few days or infrequent campaigns, which is a habit that needs breaking rather than a technical issue. Many eCommerce brands are only getting 8 to 14 percent of their revenue from email when this channel should give them 25 to 40 percent.
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