What information do I need to provide to check eligibility for retail finance?

For an indicative eligibility check on UK retail business finance, you need to provide six basic data points: trading sector (sub-sector if useful: high-street retail, e-commerce, omnichannel), trading age in months, annual turnover band, requested facility size, primary use of funds, and a broad description of credit position (clean, occasional late payments, CCJ, HMRC arrears). No documents are needed at this stage, and no credit search is run.

For a formal application after a soft-search quote, you will need the standard UK SMB pack plus retail-specific documents. Standard pack: 6 months of business bank statements, latest filed Companies House accounts, most recent management accounts, photo ID and proof of address for directors with 25%+ shareholding. Retail-specific: 6 months of card-machine statements (Stripe, Worldpay, Square, SumUp), aged stock report or stock-on-hand summary, sample EPOS daily takings reports, and (for omnichannel retailers) marketplace and platform statements (Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy).

Card-machine flow is the most important single piece of underwriting evidence for retail finance. Lenders like Capify, 365 Business Finance and Liberis underwrite primarily off card-machine takings, so a clean 6-month track is more valuable to them than polished accounts. For unsecured working capital from iwoca or Funding Circle, bank statements and accounts dominate.

For e-commerce and direct-to-consumer retailers, Wayflyer and YouLend specialise in revenue-based financing against platform integration with Shopify, Amazon, Etsy or similar. The advance is sized against expected platform revenue, repaid as a percentage of incoming sales.

See our retail loans page, our e-commerce loans page, and what documents will lenders usually ask for for the document list.