Shops in London: 40% give no way to book, text or chat online
We checked 22 websites of shops in London on 8 October 2026, drawn from Google Maps searches in the city.
40% give a customer no way to act without calling: no online booking, no chat, no text link and no WhatsApp on the home page. Whoever finds them after hours has to wait and call. Across the three cities we checked, it's 52% of shops, and London has the lowest share of the three.
40% let you book online, 25% have a chat and 15% have WhatsApp (20 home pages read).
Only 16 of the 22 sites publish their hours, too few for a figure of their own. Across all the London businesses we checked, the typical one is closed 116 of the week's 168 hours (117 sites with hours).
Phone speed: only 19 of these sites have Google's real-visitor data. Across London as a whole, 14% of the sites with that data take more than 3 seconds to show their main content.
What it costs
When a customer writes and nobody answers, a sale waits for the morning, or goes to whoever answers first.
A free fix
If the business uses WhatsApp Business, its away message answers on its own outside opening hours and says when someone will reply.
The free audit runs the same checks on your own site in about a minute and gives you your Betterlane Score.
Run the free auditShops in the other cities
Other businesses in London
Dental practices · Professional offices · Estate agents · Restaurants, cafés and bakeries · Home services and trades
How we measured
- We searched Google Maps in each city for the same six kinds of local business and checked the websites Maps lists.
- Acting without calling: an online booking link, a chat, a text (SMS) link or a WhatsApp link on the home page, read again on 19 October 2026 to add text links.
- We count a text link only when the page offers one (an sms: link or a link that says “text us”). We can’t tell from a website whether its phone number accepts texts, so a business that takes texts on its main number without saying so counts as offering no way.
- Hours: read from the site itself; the closed hours a week add up the time when no location is open.
- Speed: Google’s data from real visitors on phones (the Chrome UX Report), which exists only for sites with enough visits.
- No business is named. A figure appears only with 20 measured sites or more behind it.
- The samples do not stand for every business in a city; they show what we found on the sites we checked.
For journalists
You may use these numbers and charts with credit to Betterlane and a link to this page. To talk to Thiago Cavalcanti, who ran the study, write to thiago@betterlaneagency.com.
London chart (PNG) · All totals as CSV · The same data on Kaggle · To cite it: Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23325291
