Nobody planned for refillable vape kits to become one of the fastest-growing product categories in UK online retail. The government banned disposable vapes to reduce waste. What actually happened was millions of consumers who’d never bought anything more complicated than a prepackaged product got pushed into a market that barely existed twelve months earlier. The ripple effects of that shift are still playing out.
Disposables Were Designed to Avoid Online Retail
This is the bit most people don’t think about. Disposable vapes are sold overwhelmingly through physical retail. Corner shops, petrol stations, newsagents, supermarkets. The buying behaviour was almost entirely impulse. You were already in the shop. You grabbed one on the way out. There was no comparison shopping, no browsing, no product research. You picked a flavour, paid your money, and left.
That purchase pattern meant online vape retailers existed, but they weren’t really competing for disposable customers. Why would someone wait for delivery when they could walk fifty metres and buy the same product? The maths didn’t work for consumers, and it didn’t work for online sellers either. Margins on single disposables were thin, and shipping costs ate into whatever profit remained.
The ban on 1 June 2025 changed every part of that equation overnight.
Refillable Kits Created a Different Kind of Customer
Refillable vape kits are a fundamentally different purchase. They cost more upfront. They come with specifications that matter. Battery capacity, coil resistance, pod compatibility, tank size, and airflow settings. Consumers who never thought twice about which disposable they picked up now needed to make an informed decision about hardware.
That’s the kind of decision people make online. You search, you compare, you read about the differences between mouth-to-lung and direct-to-lung. You look at what pods are compatible with which kit. You check whether replacement coils are easy to find. None of that happens at a counter in a newsagent’s.
UK online retailers selling refillable vape kits saw traffic increase sharply through the second half of 2025. The customers weren’t vaping enthusiasts who’d been buying refillables for years. They were former disposable users doing product research for the first time. A completely new audience entering an existing market through a different door.
The Product Category Barely Existed at Scale
Refillable vape kits existed before the ban, obviously. But they occupied a niche. Enthusiast vapers who like tinkering with settings and building coils. People who’d been vaping for years and wanted more control over their experience. The market served that audience well, but it wasn’t set up for millions of new customers who just wanted something that worked like a disposable but wasn’t one.
Manufacturers responded fast. Brands like OXVA, Voopoo, and Uwell pushed out simplified refillable kits aimed squarely at former disposable users. Easy fill systems. Preset wattage. Draw-activated firing so you don’t need to press a button. The goal was to make the transition feel as close to the old experience as possible while technically being a completely different product.
The result is a product category that’s grown from niche to mainstream in under a year. As BeZiddi has covered in its look at how digital experiences are transforming consumer markets, the businesses that thrive during market disruption are the ones that remove friction from the buying process. In vaping, that meant making refillable kits feel less technical and more approachable. The brands that got that right fastest captured the biggest share of ex-disposable customers.
Online Retail Won Because the Product Demands It
There’s a structural reason online retail captured this market rather than physical shops. Refillable vape kits need an ecosystem around them. You don’t just buy a kit once and forget about it. You need replacement coils, spare pods, e-liquid, and possibly spare glass tanks or drip tips. That ongoing relationship between customer and retailer suits online shopping perfectly.
Physical vape shops carry some of this stock, sure. But no high street shop can carry every coil type for every kit from every brand. Online retailers can. The long tail of vape accessories is enormous, and it only works in a digital catalogue.
There’s also the comparison factor. Someone choosing their first refillable kit wants to see ten options side by side, read the specs, and filter by price and features. That’s a web experience, not a shop counter experience. High street vape shops still do well for advice and local convenience, but the actual purchasing behaviour for refillable hardware has shifted heavily online.
The Incoming Tax Will Accelerate This Further
From October 2026, the UK government will apply an excise duty of £2.20 per 10ml on all e-liquids. That tax applies equally whether you buy from a shop on the high street or from a website. But online retailers have one advantage that physical shops don’t. They can offer multi-buy deals, bundle kits with liquid, and absorb or spread shipping costs across larger basket sizes.
When prices rise, consumers get more careful about where they spend. They compare more. They look for deals. They buy in slightly larger quantities to reduce the per-unit cost. All of that behaviour favours online retail over impulse buying at a counter. As BeZiddi has explored in its analysis of evolving search visibility, the way consumers discover products online continues to shift. Retailers who stay visible through that change will capture the customers who are actively looking to save money on recurring purchases.
The Unintended Consequence
The UK government banned disposable vapes for environmental reasons. Single-use plastics, lithium batteries in landfill, and visible litter in every town centre. Those were real problems, and the ban addressed them. But the knock-on effect was the rapid creation of a new online retail category worth hundreds of millions of pounds annually.
Refillable vape kits went from a niche product sold to hobbyists to a mass market category sold primarily through websites. The manufacturers who simplified their products fastest won. The online retailers who stocked the widest range and made the buying process easy captured a customer base that didn’t exist eighteen months ago.
That’s the thing about regulation. It usually does what it’s designed to do. But it almost always does something else as well. In this case, it accidentally built one of the UK’s fastest-growing online product categories from almost nothing. The brands and retailers who recognised that early are the ones sitting in the strongest position now.
