Primark confirms home delivery in Great Britain after years of resisting online

Primark will start delivering orders to homes in Great Britain. Its owner, Associated British Foods, confirmed the plan on 10 September 2026. The chain has sold clothes without a proper online shop for its whole history.

Primark bought an automated Sheffield warehouse for 90m pounds

The chain has already paid for the machinery it needs. Associated British Foods said Primark has taken over a highly automated fulfilment centre in Sheffield, bought from Boohoo for 90 million pounds, according to Marketing Week. A fulfilment centre is a warehouse built to pack single parcels for shoppers rather than pallets for shops.

No launch date has been given. The company also kept the wording narrow: Great Britain first, not Ireland, and not the rest of Europe.

Click and collect ran for four years before this decision

Primark did not start from nothing. Click and collect, where you order online and pick the parcel up in a shop, has been running for about four years and now covers Great Britain. The chain built a website, a mobile app and a customer database around it.

That is the part other value chains often miss. Delivery is the last piece, not the first. Retailers such as Sephora selling through TikTok Shop follow the same order: build the audience and the stock system, then open the checkout.

Like-for-like sales fell about 3 percent in the fourth quarter

The move lands in a weak year. Marketing Week reported fourth-quarter like-for-like sales down about 3 percent, with full-year sales still growing around 2 percent. Retail Gazette put the full-year like-for-like fall at 2.6 percent and the adjusted operating margin at about 10 percent. Like-for-like strips out new shops, so it shows what the existing ones did.

George Weston says Primark is redefining value beyond price

Chief executive George Weston said Primark is “redefining value and not just through price”, pointing to quality, style and the shop itself. Primark launched a campaign called Iconic Value in July 2026 on the same idea. Rivals in the same market have been pulled up on price claims, as when Sports Direct had adverts banned over price claims.

For anyone selling cheap goods, the practical point is the basket. Home delivery adds a picking and postage cost to every order, and low-price baskets carry that cost badly. Watch what Primark sets as a free-delivery threshold and what it charges below it. That number will show whether the chain plans to earn money on delivery or to use it to pull people back into shops.