Click-Away Pound — Disabled Shoppers' Survey Estimating £17.1 Billion Lost to Inaccessible UK Retail Websites

The Click-Away Pound is a research survey of disabled people's online shopping experiences, created by Freeney Williams with Business Disability International and run in 2016 and 2019 (published February 2020). Its purpose is to give retailers a business case for accessibility by estimating what they lose when disabled customers abandon sites.
The 2016 edition estimated more than 4 million people had left a retail website because of barriers, worth about £11.75 billion. The 2019 edition put lost spend at £17.1 billion, roughly 10% of UK online spend in 2018 by the authors' per-capita estimate. Reported findings include that 69% of disabled online consumers leave sites they find hard to use, 83% limit shopping to sites they know are accessible, 86% would pay more for an accessible site, and only 8% of those who struggle contact the site owner, so losses stay invisible. The share meeting barriers on more than a quarter of sites was nearly flat between waves (73% in 2016, 72% in 2019).
Caveats matter: the figures come from self-reported survey responses scaled by the authors to a population estimate, not from transaction data, and secondary sources quote differing counts of affected shoppers (4.9 million in the original, 4.3 million in later coverage). The survey is also an advocacy-oriented consultancy product rather than an independent, peer-reviewed evaluation. Its lasting contribution is the frame it gave the sector, and the finding that three years of awareness produced almost no measured improvement.

Read the full analysis: https://www.clickawaypound.com/