The Internet is Sending Us Back to the High Street

Online shopping was supposed to kill the high street. Fewer journeys, no queues, everything delivered to your door. That was the pitch for twenty years.

So it's strange to watch the internet start pushing people the other way.

American Express, working with Retail Economics, found that social media now drives 1.7 billion visits to UK high streets a year. That's more than 30 million a week. Almost two-thirds of UK adults say they've walked into a shop, restaurant or venue because of something they saw online. Among Gen Z it's 88%.

The researchers have a name for it: the "viral pilgrimage economy". People find something on their phone, then go and stand in front of it in real life.

Worth sitting with that for a second, because it flips the usual story. We talk about online and physical retail like they're competing for the same customer. Increasingly they're just two halves of the same trip.

From scrolling to queuing

A fifteen-second video can turn a bakery into somewhere worth crossing town for. A product goes from unknown to unmissable because someone filmed it on a shop counter. A business that used to be known on its own street can suddenly be pulling customers from three postcodes away.

35% of Gen Z shoppers say they've travelled to another city just to buy something they saw trending online. Once they get there, 87% say they'd queue for it.

That's the bit that should stop you. This is a generation that grew up with next-day delivery, and they're choosing to wait in line anyway.

Because the friction isn't a cost any more. It's part of the point. Standing outside somewhere for twenty minutes feels different when you found the place yourself, got curious about it, told a friend, and now you're finally there. The wait becomes proof the thing was worth wanting.

The screen is the shop window now

That changes what social media is actually for.

The old assumption was that a post exists to trigger a sale. Click, buy, done. But that's rarely how it plays out. Someone sees a product on Instagram, googles the brand, watches a TikTok, reads a couple of reviews, looks into who founded it and only then decides to go and see it in person, or buy it.

Research from IMRG backs this up: social is one of the biggest sources of product discovery in the UK right now, but people still finish the journey on brand websites, search engines and marketplaces before they hand over any money.

Discovery, research and purchase have come apart. They now happen in three different places, sometimes on three different days.

For a small brand, that's both a gift and a headache. The gift is reach: you're no longer relying on footfall past a shop door. The headache is that getting noticed isn't the hard part any more. Giving that attention somewhere to land is.

Where marketplaces come in

This is where I think the job of an online marketplace needs to change.

The old model was basically a filing cabinet: list the sellers, make them searchable, take a cut on the way through. Fine for convenience, but it doesn't do anything with curiosity once you've captured it.

If social media is the shop window, a marketplace should be the street behind it. Somewhere you can actually wander. Somewhere finding one brand leads you to the next one worth knowing. Somewhere a product comes with a reason, not just a price.

That matters most for independent brands, because what makes them worth buying from rarely fits into a single product listing. It's the founder's story. The way it's made. Why it exists at all. Right now that context is scattered across an Instagram bio, a website About page, one old interview and a stack of reviews. Nobody's pulling it into one place.

What this means for Arilique

The ambition is not simply to put independent businesses in one place. It is to create a marketplace where the thinking behind those businesses remains visible: the founder, the decisions, the purpose and the product itself.

Because when everything is available, the real value may lie in knowing what is worth your attention.

And perhaps that is what good curation has always done. It reduces the noise without reducing the choice that makes discovery exciting.