What 275 UK online shops' websites fail to answer

Summary: we asked 275 UK online shops' websites the ten questions a customer asks before buying - delivery, returns, contact, opening hours, sizing, price, stock, guarantee. One question in five had no answer anywhere on the site. One shop in three could not answer three or more of the ten. Four in ten have no FAQ or help page at all. The words are usually there; they are not arranged as answers.

The numbers

• 20.6% of shopper questions go unanswered by the shop's own website (2,570 questions across 257 shops; 74.0% were answered from the site, 5.4% were unclear).
• 35% of shops cannot answer three or more of the ten questions a customer asks before buying.
• 41% of shops declare no FAQ or help page, and 32% publish a delivery or returns policy but no FAQ - the policy exists, the plain answer does not. 8% declare none of FAQ, policy or guide pages.
• 7% of shops could not be read by an automated visitor at all (19 of 275): the site returned no pages, several behind a hosting firewall that blocks datacenter addresses. Those shops are invisible to AI search and shopping assistants in the same way.
• Content is not the problem. The median page holds about 2,160 characters; only 2% of sites are thin and under 1% are client-rendered shells. Two thirds list a product catalogue, median 252 products.

What it means for a shop owner

A visitor who cannot find the delivery cost, the returns window or a phone number does not email to ask. They leave. The sites in this study are not empty - most have a policy page, a product catalogue and some guides. What they lack is the short, findable answer: a FAQ that says "we deliver to the UK mainland in 2-4 working days, GBP 4.95, free over GBP 60", linked from the header and footer.

The same gap shows up with AI assistants and AI search: they can only repeat what a site says. A shop whose website does not state its returns window gets no returns answer, however good the assistant.

How to check your own shop in ten minutes

1. Open your site in a private window and try to find, in under a minute each: delivery cost and times, returns window, a phone number or contact form, opening hours (if you have a counter), a size guide, whether an item is in stock, your guarantee.
2. Every answer that took more than a minute, or that you found only in the terms and conditions, belongs in a FAQ page linked from the footer.
3. Check that your site answers to a plain visitor without a browser: if a fetch of your homepage returns an error page or a firewall challenge, AI assistants and some search crawlers see nothing.

Free check: chatixy.com/tools/shop-website-check reads up to 40 pages of a shop and reports which of the ten questions the site answers.

Method

• Sample: 275 UK online shops with a cart or checkout, crawled between September and October 2026 for private product demos. Shops were chosen by niche (furniture, beds, e-bikes, camping, garden, pets, supplements, baby, hot tubs, coffee), not at random; the results describe these shops, not UK e-commerce as a whole. 42 wedding venues crawled in the same period were excluded.
• Crawl: up to 150 public pages per shop, guided by the site's sitemap and homepage links, respecting robots.txt. 19 shops returned no pages.
• Questions: ten per shop, generated from the shop's own pages to match what its customers would ask (delivery, returns, contact, hours, sizing, price, stock, guarantee, products), then put to an assistant that may only answer from the crawled pages. A question counts as answered when the answer is grounded in a page of the site; as unanswered when nothing relevant exists on the site; the rest (hedged or ungrounded answers) count as unclear and are not blamed on the site. 257 shops completed the check.
• Pages declared: FAQ, policy and guide pages are counted from the URLs a site itself lists in its sitemap and links from its homepage, classified by the words in the URL. A returns policy living at an unnamed URL is not counted, so the "no FAQ" figures are an upper bound on what is findable, not on what exists.
• Aggregate only. No shop is named; no per-niche figure is reported for fewer than ten shops; nothing from any demo conversation is used.

Chatixy (chatixy.com) is an AI support agent that answers customers from a shop's own website. Plans from EUR 19/mo, 7-day trial. A brand of SIA Devoflex, Latvia.