Retail Trust Index 2024: only 54% of UK's biggest retailers give the option to reject cookies in one click
Study reveals only half of top 50 UK retailers offer opt-out on first layer consent banners. Will this rate be close to 100% in 2025?
Yes, I’m happy vs Manage Cookie Settings
Yes, I Accept vs Manage Cookies
Accept vs Cookie Settings
Allow All vs Cookie Settings
Two cold choices welcome you to 46% of the UK’s favourite online stores.
What do you do?
Its a no brainer.
We only want to shop.
We have no time to deal with cookie toggles.
At what cost though?
How does it make you feel?
We may have normalised it by now, yet we still feel trapped.
Brand reputation is severely damaged.
Marketers know it, yet don’t know what to do.
Levels of trust are at an all time low.
That’s why many marketers and DPOs, as well as engineers and data scientists (for completely different reasons) attended the Retail Trust Index event in London last week.
Only 54% of the 50 biggest UK retail brands analysed in the 2024 report offer visitors the option to reject all cookies in the first layer.
Be 2025, this rate will be closer to 100%.
With stricter privacy regulation on first layer opt-out obligations, together with brilliant campaigns like “Pay or OKay” from noyb.eu, adoption and enforcement will accelerate.
What’s the effect?
Of all retailers I personally asked at the event, once visitors are presented with a clear (and genuine*) opt-out option, between 40-60% of data is no longer collected.
*Many still display deceiving wording (and designs) to circumvent legislation: allow non-essential, required cookies only, etc..
A 40-60% loss of the data is an economic disaster.
To start with, brands freeze their performance marketing budgets and go for (less targeted) branding campaigns instead.
Then they push for more 1st party data and beefing up their CPDs with richer customer profiles.
Next, once they realised that 1st party tracking, forms, and quizzes are not good enough, they learn about something called privacy by design and customer empowerment.
Yes, there’s a way.
A new way to relate to your customers.
Other highlights from the Retail Trust Index 2024:
Privacy is a hot relevant topic among retailers: +40 retailers and privacy experts attended the event in Soho House.
Privacy matters beyond legal & compliance. Product managers, engineers, data scientists, marketeers, customer/loyalty from large UK retailers among attendees.
Groceries the most active vertical adopting privacy-by-design strategies.
Health data, such as drug prescriptions and nutritional preferences, among the most sensitive of customer data sets.
Trust ranking criteria:
Privacy:
54% of sites have Reject All in first layer of Consent Banner.
Rate increases YoY with stricter privacy regulation.
Most of the retailers agreed that it resulted between 40-60% drop in data collection.
Security: 10%. 5 /50 brands suffered a data breach.
Accessibility: No significant changes. A constant rating YoY.
RTI25: A new criteria will be added: Artificial Intelligence. Privacy policy pages should reflect the use of customer personal data for model training purposes.