Many UK small businesses will miss their share of £5bn of sales – will you?

What on earth is cyber weekend? If you’re imagining dressing up in silver foil and running around scaring kids, you’re up the wrong tree. Although that does sound like a lot of fun.

No, cyber weekend is the five day period on the run-up to Christmas, where an insane amount of stuff is sold. In 2015, shoppers spent a cool £3.3bn over the weekend, which was up a third on the previous year. This year experts are predicting those sales to top £5bn. That’s Five. Billion. Pounds. The phenomenon was imported from the US, where Black Friday is said to signify the day a retailer ‘went into the black’. It marks the official start of the holiday retailing season, usually the most profitable time for retailers.

Last year marked a big change in consumer behaviour. More punters than ever decided not to brave the cold high street. Instead, digitally savvy consumers chose to browse in the comfort of their home or work and shopped online. So this all sounds like great news for retailers? Well. That’s until you hear that small businesses are losing out. Oh.

According to research by the Department for Business, Industry & Skills, nearly half of small businesses still don’t have a website. For those that do, two thirds don’t have one which is transactional – people can’t make purchases via ecommerce on it. Worse still, many of those that can, don’t work properly on a mobile phone, despite more than half of all transactions now being done on mobiles or tablets.