Your biggest competitor just doubled their ad spend. Can you afford not to?
E-commerce moves fast. If you can't stock up before peak season, fund the ad campaign, or hire the extra staff, someone else will. This kind of funding lets you invest now and repay as a percentage of your sales. Busy month? Pay more. Quiet month? Pay less.
Works with Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Stripe, PayPal. Funds often land within days.
The e-commerce timing problem
You need to spend money before you make it. Stock has to be ordered months before peak. Ads need budget before they generate sales. Warehousing needs paying upfront. Traditional banks take 6-8 weeks to decide - by then, peak season is over and your competitor took the market share.
72h
Typical time from application to funds in your account. Same-day possible for urgent cases.
Flex
Repay as a % of daily sales. Post-Christmas slump? Repayments drop automatically.
Repeat
Once you've repaid, you can access more. Many businesses take second and third rounds.
What e-commerce businesses actually use it for
Stock before peak season
Black Friday, Christmas, summer - you need inventory before the rush, not during it. Fund a bulk order, negotiate better supplier prices, and sell at full margin when demand hits.
Scale ad spend when it's working
You've found a winning product and a winning ad. Every pound you put in returns three. But your cash is tied up in stock. Funding lets you scale the campaign while the window is open.
New product line launch
Minimum order quantities, packaging design, photography, listing setup. A new line costs money before it earns any. Get it funded and launched while the opportunity is live.
Warehouse and fulfilment
Move from your spare room to a proper warehouse. Hire a 3PL. Buy packaging equipment. The infrastructure to go from 50 orders a day to 500.
International expansion
New market stock, localised listings, international shipping setup, local partnerships. Breaking into Europe or the US costs real money upfront.
Working capital between payouts
Amazon pays every two weeks. Shopify batches payments. PayPal holds funds. Funding bridges the gap so you can keep ordering stock and running ads without waiting.
How lenders read an online business
An online business is underwritten from its payment processors and its bank feed, which is why e-commerce is one of the easier sectors to fund and one of the easiest to misjudge. Gross merchandise value looks impressive. What a lender sizes against is settled revenue after refunds and platform fees, and on some marketplaces that is a fifth smaller than the number on the seller dashboard.
Time trading is the first gate, and it catches more online sellers than any other criterion. 21 of our 55 unsecured lenders will look at a business under a year old, and 5 will look at one with no trading history at all (checked September 2026; panel composition changes over time). A store six months into a good run is fundable. A store six weeks into one is usually waiting.
Two more criteria decide the shortlist before anyone talks about pricing. 39 of those lenders will lend to a director who rents rather than owns, and 24 accept minor adverse credit older than 24 months (both checked September 2026, and every case is subject to the lender's own checks). Neither is a wall. Both change which names see the file.
The honest limitation of revenue-linked funding is seasonality working in reverse. A percentage of daily sales feels gentle in January and expensive in the week after Black Friday, when takings are high and the sweep takes its share of every one of them. Stock bought in September on a facility that repays fastest in November can be the right trade. Ads funded the same way, when the campaign has not proved itself, usually are not.
What the panel does at e-commerce sizes
At £25,000 unsecured, 36 lenders on our panel have a product covering the amount, over terms from 1 to 72 months. At £100,000 it is 45 lenders, with terms out to 120 months. Published floors across those products start at 4.1%, and the typical floor is nearer 15.3% (checked September 2026, spans across panel products rather than offers).
Product ceilings run £1,000 to £20 million across the unsecured panel, which is what the products allow rather than what any store would be offered. Where the business sells business-to-business on terms, 20 invoice finance lenders are a cheaper answer to the same cash gap, because they advance against an invoice someone has already agreed to pay. We arrange either; the lender decides which one you get.
The three shapes an online business borrows in
Facts checked 9 September 2026
Product mapping and lender counts and amount bands from each lender's published criteria; ONS retail sales figures read on 9 September 2026. No e-commerce flag exists on the platform and the copy says so.
The warehouse, which almost nobody buys and a few outgrow
Most online sellers rent, and a lease deposit is working capital rather than a property case. The minority who buy a unit are on a commercial mortgage, and 32 of the 45 commercial mortgage lenders on our panel name industrial premises in their criteria (checked September 2026); that part is property-secured lending for UK limited companies and LLPs, covered on our industrial unit page rather than here. No asset class on our platform is called warehouse equipment; a conveyor may pass as factory plant, a pallet rack rarely does.
Stock and kit, where the lender can and cannot take title
Stock is the thing an online business borrows for most and the thing no asset lender will hold as security, because 4,000 units of a seasonal product have no resale market a funder trusts. So stock is funded on cash flow, through an unsecured loan, a merchant cash advance or revenue-based finance, sized on settled payouts. The kit around it does finance as an asset: 25 of the 38 asset finance lenders on our panel fund computer hardware, and 32 fund a delivery van (checked September 2026). Splitting the purchase, van on hire purchase and stock on the advance, usually costs less in total, because the van lender is pricing a van and not a Black Friday forecast.
The payout gap, sized on Shopify, Stripe and Amazon statements
Amazon settles every 14 days, Stripe on a rolling basis, and a supplier wants 30% on order and the balance before the container ships. That gap is the working-capital shape and the product built for it repays as a share of each payout. At £25,000 unsecured, 36 of our 55 unsecured lenders have a product covering the amount, and at £100,000 it is 45 (checked September 2026). A wholesale arm invoicing retailers on 60-day terms opens a second door: 20 invoice finance lenders, of which 15 accept a business trading under a year and 17 proceed without a homeowning director. UK Finance members advanced £22.7bn against invoices and assets to 40,100 businesses in their reporting year (2024 data).
What the panel data does and does not count for e-commerce
No product on our platform carries an e-commerce, online-retail or marketplace flag. Every count on this page is therefore an amount band (lenders with a product covering £25,000 or £100,000), a criteria feature (trading age, homeowner status, adverse credit) or an asset class (computer hardware, vans), and none of them counts lenders that name online sellers, because none can. The one sector heading used above, industrial, is a commercial mortgage flag for the building only. All were checked September 2026; panel composition changes with each pull.
Two numbers to carry into an application
The channel is no longer the growth story, which changes how a lender reads a store. The Office for National Statistics' retail sales release of 21 August 2026 puts online at 28.3% of all retail sales in July 2026, down from 29.2% in June, a share that has settled in the high twenties rather than climbing. An online business now competes for a fixed slice, and the file that gets funded shows margin after advertising, not growth in orders.
The other number is the decline rate. 40% of SME bank loan applications are declined (BVA BDRC SME Finance Monitor, survey data to 2024 and Q2 2025), and a seller with 11 months of trading and a rented flat is the profile that figure is made of. It is also the profile the 21 under-a-year lenders exist for.
Sources
- Office for National Statistics, Retail sales, Great Britain: July 2026 (released 21 August 2026)
- BVA BDRC, SME Finance Monitor (survey data to 2024 and Q2 2025)
- UK Finance, invoice finance and asset-based lending (2024 data)
- British Business Bank, Small Business Finance Markets 2025/26 (published March 2026, 2025 data)
The ONS release was read on 9 September 2026. Panel counts and amount bands were checked September 2026, available products only.
“So quick and easy. Super friendly. My second time now. The funds have enabled me to revamp my business without breaking the bank. Would definitely recommend.”
Verified business owner, YouLend Trustpilot review
E-commerce funding questions
What is an ecommerce business loan in the UK?▼
A business loan or revenue-based facility underwritten from an online store's payout and bank data rather than from a shop lease or a trading premises. On our panel 36 unsecured lenders have a product covering £25,000 and 45 cover £100,000, with published floors from 4.1% and a median floor of 15.3% (checked September 2026). No lender on the panel names e-commerce as a product; the term describes the borrower, not the loan.
Can an Amazon or Shopify seller get a business loan?▼
Yes, and the platform statements are the underwriting. A lender reads settled payouts after fees and refunds, so a seller whose dashboard shows £40,000 a month and whose payouts show £31,000 is assessed on the £31,000. 21 of our 55 unsecured lenders accept a store trading under a year and 39 lend to a director who rents (checked September 2026).
Can I get funding for stock before Black Friday?▼
That is the case revenue-linked funding fits best, because the facility drawn in September repays fastest in the weeks the stock sells. The test is total cost against the margin on the order: an advance repaid across November and December at a fixed factor costs the same whether the stock sells in 3 weeks or 8, so the gross margin on the line has to clear it with room. Stock itself is not security; 25 asset lenders fund the hardware around it, none fund the pallets.
Does a merchant cash advance work for an online store?▼
It works where the takings come through a card processor the lender can read, which covers Shopify Payments, Stripe and most gateway accounts. Repayment is a fixed share of each settlement, so a quiet January costs less than a busy November. It suits stock and a proven campaign; it suits an untested campaign badly, because the sweep continues whether the ads convert or not. Enquiring does not affect your credit score.
Do you arrange e-commerce funding for sole traders?▼
Yes. We work with sole traders and partnerships as well as limited companies and LLPs for business loans, asset finance, invoice finance and merchant cash advances. Property-secured lending (commercial mortgages, bridging, development and buy-to-let) is for limited companies and LLPs only. Lender criteria differ by structure, so tell us how you trade and we will go to the right part of the panel.
Stock up, scale up, stay ahead
3-minute form. Works with all major platforms. Funds often land within days.
The panel behind this page
Through our broker network we place cases with a panel of 200+ UK lenders offering 1,800+ products, from high-street banks to specialist funds. We check criteria first and approach only the lenders whose requirements you fit. The full roster is published in our lender directory.