A quarter of high street business confident of sales increase

High street businesses are cautious about the outlook for the year ahead, according to recent research by web hosting provider 34SP.com.

Only 27% of high street businesses are confident that sales activity will rise over the next 12 months, the research found, while some 40% reported that that felt the state of the economy is bad.

34SP.com polled more than 1,000 small and medium sized businesses, both online businesses and traditional bricks and mortar. The findings indicate that high street businesses are less confident about the future of business than their web based counterparts.

Daniel Foster, founder and technical director of 34SP.com, said, "Although both e-commerce and high street businesses expect to see a significant improvement in the state of the UK economy over the next 12 months, online retailers feel more confident that this will feed through to a stronger business performance."