What happens to your online shop, blog or side hustle when you die
1 August 2026 · Inherit Vault
A pension has a nomination form. A bank account has a bereavement team. An Etsy shop with four years of five-star reviews has neither, and it can vanish through simple inactivity long before anyone thinks to ask what it was worth.
What's actually at risk
Domain renewals lapse silently, often auto-charged to a card that gets cancelled or declined within months of a death, after which the domain becomes available for anyone to buy, sometimes including the business's own former customers or competitors. Hosting accounts, app store listings, and payment processors (Stripe, PayPal) all have their own dormancy and verification rules, most of which assume the account holder is available to respond to an email.
The part people don't expect
Recurring revenue doesn't stop being owed just because the owner has died, subscriptions keep billing customers, affiliate obligations continue, and platform terms of service rarely have a clean "this person has died" pathway, most require the account itself to log in and close things down properly. An executor with no access can't do that on the business's behalf, only the account holder's own login can, in most cases.
Value that's easy to lose
A profitable online shop or content business is a real estate asset, sometimes worth more than obvious things like a car, but only if someone can find the accounts, the analytics, the supplier list, and the login details in time to either run it or sell it. Left undocumented, most small online businesses are worth nothing within a year, not because they weren't valuable, but because nobody could get in.
What actually helps
Not your passwords stored loosely, that creates its own security problem, but a structured list: which platforms, which business bank account, who your accountant or supplier contacts are, and what you'd want to happen, sold, wound down, or handed to a co-founder. That's the map an executor needs to either keep a business alive or close it properly, instead of watching it expire by default.
Sorting this out for someone else? Make sure your family never has to.
Most of the time goes on finding out what the person had and who to call. Inherit Vault keeps that list for you: your accounts, pensions and policies, and where your will is kept. Only you can read it. Your executor gets it when it is needed.
Read more
- What happens to a franchise when the franchisee dies? (UK)
- What happens to a sole trader or limited company when the owner dies (UK)
- Joint bank accounts and death: what actually happens (UK)
- Deed of variation: how to change a will after a death (UK)
- What can you do while you wait for probate? (UK, 2026)