UKIPO Tightens the Proof Test in Non-Use Revocations
UKIPO’s updated April 2026 guidance on non-use revocation, read together with a growing line of Tribunal decisions, is making life harder for proprietors trying to defend registrations with thin evidence. Formally, the latest trade mark-related entry in the published Tribunal Practice Notice list is still TPN 1/2024 from July 2024. In practice, however, the evidential line on genuine use has become more exacting. Platform screenshots, scattered sales records and transaction traces that do not land clearly on UK consumers are becoming much less persuasive when standing on their own.
This matters particularly for cross-border e-commerce businesses. Many proprietors have grown used to relying on Amazon pages, marketplace dashboards, app-store listings or website snapshots to show that a mark was “on the market.” The harder question now is not whether the mark appeared online, but whether the evidence forms a credible commercial story: who bought, where they were, what was sold, how long the activity lasted, whether the UK market was genuinely being targeted, and whether the scale and frequency of sales make commercial sense. Once that chain breaks, the material begins to look less like genuine use and more like symbolic record-making.
The question is no longer whether there was a sale, but what that sale actually proves
The 2026 UKIPO guidance is notably concrete about what proprietors are expected to show. It is not enough to say that the mark was used at some point. The evidence should identify the goods or services concerned, turnover, sales records or invoices, advertising from the relevant period, the proportion of the period during which the mark was used, the geographical area of use, and how the mark appeared in trade. That shifts the focus away from isolated screenshots and towards a set of commercial facts that can be cross-checked against one another.
That shift matters because many defence files have historically been built backwards. A proprietor facing revocation would often start by pulling whatever was easiest to extract from internal systems: a few orders, a product page, some social content, perhaps one or two invoices. That approach now carries more risk. The Tribunal is not there to fill the gaps in the narrative. If the material shows only that a platform registered some activity, but not that the mark was genuinely functioning in the UK market as a badge of origin for real trade, the defence starts on weak ground.
Drop-shipping is not automatically fatal, but snapshots are increasingly weak on their own
The pressure point is not one particular business model. It is the gap between digital traces and market reality. Drop-shipping, marketplace fulfilment, app distribution and third-party retail can all support genuine use. The difficulty is that those models often produce fragmented evidence: platform order pages, settlement statements, dispatch records, social media promotions and third-party listings that all suggest something happened, yet do not necessarily answer the core questions. Where exactly were the UK consumers? Was the activity sustained? Were the goods or services really being offered under the mark in a way that created or preserved a market in the UK?
Recent UKIPO decisions are pushing in that direction quite clearly. In some cases, the Tribunal has said that where sales evidence is not particularly compelling, download figures or broad monetary references are not enough without other supporting material. In others, even where sales volume looked substantial, the inability to identify where UK consumers were located remained a real evidential weakness. For businesses dependent on cross-border fulfilment, the lesson is practical rather than ideological: drop-shipping is not the problem by itself. The real problem is having platform activity without a usable UK market coordinate.
The Tribunal is steadily pushing “trace-making” back toward real market use
There is a broader policy instinct behind this. UK trade mark law does not require massive scale, but it does resist use that exists mainly to preserve registration rather than to support actual trade. The Tribunal is increasingly interested in whether the activity has commercially intelligible continuity, not whether it is just possible to assemble a few pages showing that a transaction occurred. Low-frequency orders, sporadic activity, no meaningful advertising, no stable UK destination pattern, no warehousing or fulfilment explanation, and no believable path from offer to consumer are exactly the kinds of features that make evidence drift toward token use.
That is why many cross-border sellers will need to abandon the old logic of “leave enough traces now and explain the rest later.” Revocation proceedings are not a brand scrapbook exercise. They ask whether the mark really performed its market function in the UK by distinguishing goods or services and helping maintain an outlet for them. If the Tribunal sees the activity as the bare minimum needed to keep a registration alive, rather than as commercially rational conduct directed at the UK market, scattered online records will rarely carry the case very far.
What businesses should be doing now
First, stop treating platform screenshots as primary evidence. At best they are signposts. The heavier material is still the material that lands on counterparties and territory: UK order records, invoices, payment data, fulfilment or logistics records, timed advertising evidence, UK consumer reviews, channel agreements, stock records and returns data. Second, organise evidence continuously, not only when proceedings begin. In non-use cases the problem is often not a lack of volume but a lack of coherence across time, place and product.
Third, cross-border teams need to solve the UK-consumer-identification issue early. If the back-end only shows platform codes and not country, region, delivery destination or fulfilment points, that becomes painful once the file is tested by the Tribunal. Fourth, retain not only proof of completed sales but also proof of how goods or services were actively pushed into the UK market: UK-targeted advertising, localised webpages, pricing and delivery terms, promotion records and channel discussions. What UKIPO increasingly wants to see is not merely that the mark appeared somewhere online, but that it sat within a commercially intelligible chain of UK use. Anyone still trying to defend registrations with a handful of screenshots is taking a growing risk.
