AO World
UK electrical retailer
AO World plc, trading as ao.com, is an electrical retailer based in Bolton, England. It operates in the United Kingdom (ao.com), and operated in Germany (ao.de) until July 2022 and in the Netherlands (ao.nl) until November 2019, specialising in household kitchen appliances, (such as washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers and cookers) and other electricals. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
History
The company was founded under the name Appliances Online by John Roberts in 2000. Prior to this, during a conversation in a Bolton pub, a close friend bet Roberts £1 that he could not set up his own company and disrupt the white goods market by selling appliances online.
As well as selling directly to consumers, the company also sold kitchen appliances on behalf of other retailers such as Next, House of Fraser and B&Q. In 2009 the company acquired the distribution business Expert Logistics, enabling end-to-end control of their operation.
In 2013 Appliances Online rebranded to AO.com, which included a redesign of their logo to its current state.
In February 2014, the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange as AO World. The IPO allowed the company to raise funds for European expansion.
In 2015 AO.com announced plans for their second overseas website, AO.nl In the same year, a number of AO employees completed a Germany to Bolton bike ride to raise money for a new playground.
“AO World” enters the record as uK electrical retailer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what World, electrical and retailer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5206064. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2019, 2000 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “AO World” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.