Why is my Shopify store not getting sales? 9 things to check, in order

If your Shopify store isn’t getting sales, the cause is usually in one of three places: not enough of the right people are arriving, the product page doesn’t convince the ones who do, or the checkout loses them at the last step. The fix depends on which one, so don’t guess. Your own numbers will tell you.

I built three ecommerce stores and scaled them to seven figures. The most expensive lesson in that work was fixing the wrong thing first. Here are the nine checks I’d run, in the order I’d run them, so you fix what’s actually broken.

First, find where people drop off

Every sale goes through the same steps. Shopify’s built-in analytics shows how many sessions added to cart, reached checkout and converted. Look at the last 30 days and find the biggest drop.

1. VisitAre the right people arriving?
2. Product pageDo they understand and want it?
3. Add to cartIs the price and offer clear?
4. CheckoutAny surprises or friction?
5. OrderThen follow-up and repeat

Where the drop is	What it usually means	Start with checks
Few visits at all	Not enough traffic	1, 2
Visits but almost no add to cart	Wrong traffic, weak offer or product page	2, 4, 5, 6
Add to cart but few checkouts	Price or costs revealed too late	7
Checkout started but few orders	Checkout friction or trust	6, 7, 8
Orders, but nobody comes back	No follow-up	9

Check 1: Is anyone actually arriving?

A new store with no traffic has no sales problem yet. It has a traffic problem. Look at sessions per day and where they come from. If it’s mostly you, friends and bots, that’s normal for a new store and not a sign the product has failed.

Traffic has to come from somewhere: ads, search, social content, email, partnerships or marketplaces. Pick one channel to start and do it properly. If you choose Meta ads, set a test budget you can afford to lose while you learn. Facebook ads budget for small business covers how I’d size one.

Check 2: Is it the right traffic?

Plenty of visits and no sales often means the wrong people are arriving. Signs: very short visits, high bounce from one source, or traffic from places that don’t match your customer.

Check what the ad or post promised against what the page shows. If the ad says “half price” and the page shows full price, people leave. If you’re paying for ads and getting clicks with no sales, Facebook ads not converting walks through the ad side of this.

Check 3: Is your tracking working?

Before you trust any number, place a test order and confirm it shows up in Shopify and in any ad platform you use. Broken tracking makes good campaigns look bad and bad ones look fine. It’s dull, it takes ten minutes, and it saves you from making decisions on wrong data.

Check 4: Does the offer make sense?

This is the uncomfortable one. Sometimes the product, the price or the promise doesn’t give people a reason to buy now, from you. Ask yourself:

• Can a stranger tell in a few seconds what this is and who it’s for?
• Is it clearly better, different or easier to buy than the obvious alternative?
• Is the price reasonable for what the page shows?

If you’re not sure, ask. The customer research questions post has questions to ask people who looked and didn’t buy. A clear value proposition at the top of the page fixes more stores than any app.

Check 5: Does the product page answer the obvious questions?

People can’t touch the product, so the page has to do it for them. A good product page answers, without scrolling far:

• What is it, and what does it do for me?
• What does it look like in real life, at real size?
• What does it cost, including shipping, and when will it arrive?
• What if it doesn’t work for me?

Use real photos from several angles, a short plain description that leads with the benefit, and the shipping cost and delivery time near the price. If you send ad traffic to a page built for browsing, it may help to read landing page vs product page.

Check 6: Do people trust you?

A new store has no reputation, so you have to show you’re real. Trust signals that matter:

• A real contact email and a business address or location.
• A clear returns and refund policy, linked near the price.
• Reviews from real buyers once you have them. Never fake them.
• An About page that says who’s behind the store.

In Baymard’s survey, 19% of shoppers who abandoned an order said they didn’t trust the site with their card details (Baymard Institute).

Check 7: Are there surprise costs?

This is often one of the biggest leaks in a store. Baymard Institute’s research puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, across 50 studies (the list as I read it in October 2026, which includes people who were just browsing). When it asked US shoppers why they abandoned during checkout (setting aside people who were just browsing), these were the top reasons (Baymard Institute):

Reason for abandoning	Share of shoppers
Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees)	40%
Delivery was too slow	20%
Didn’t trust the site with card details	19%
Had to create an account	18%
Checkout too long or complicated	17%
Website had errors or crashed	17%
Returns policy not satisfactory	13%
Couldn’t see the total cost up front	12%

Show shipping costs early, on the product page, and consider building shipping into the price or offering a clear free-shipping threshold. No one likes a surprise at the last step.

Check 8: Is the checkout easy?

Shopify’s checkout is solid out of the box, which is a good reason not to over-customise it. Still check:

• Guest checkout is allowed. Don’t force account creation.
• The payment methods your customers expect are turned on.
• Discount code fields don’t send people off hunting for codes.
• It works properly on a phone, where many of your visitors will browse and buy.

Baymard estimates that a large ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design alone (Baymard Institute). Your store won’t necessarily see that, but it shows how much a checkout can matter.

Check 9: Do you follow up?

Not everyone buys on the first visit. An abandoned cart email sequence brings some of them back for very little effort. Abandoned cart email examples has a sequence you can copy. And if you’re emailing Canadians, check the consent rules in the CASL compliance checklist.

Common mistakes

• Buying traffic before fixing the page. Ads multiply what your store already does, good or bad.
• Changing everything at once. Change one thing, wait for enough data, then decide.
• Installing more apps. Each one adds load time and clutter. Most stores need fewer apps, not more.
• Hiding shipping costs. They’ll find out at checkout anyway, and many will leave there.
• Judging on a few days of data. A handful of visits can’t tell you much. Give a change time to show up.

Where this fits

A store that isn’t selling is usually stuck on one of the three bottlenecks I see most: the offer, the ads or the follow-up. I explain how to tell which in where growth gets stuck, and once sales start, Meta ads ROAS shows how to tell if your ads are actually profitable.

The Growth Diagnostic checks your offer, ads, store and follow-up, then gives you a written 90-day plan in priority order. If your store is getting visits but not sales, book a call.

Sources

• Baymard Institute. “Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics.” baymard.com

Questions people ask

How many visitors do I need before I should expect a sale?

It depends on your price, your product and where the visitors come from, so there's no single number. What matters more is where they drop off. If many people add to cart but few buy, the problem is the checkout or the costs. If almost nobody adds to cart, it's the traffic, the offer or the product page.

Why do people add to cart but not buy?

The most common reason in Baymard Institute's survey of shoppers is extra costs such as shipping, taxes and fees appearing late. Slow delivery, not trusting the site and being forced to create an account are also near the top.

Should I run ads if my store has no sales yet?

Only a small, controlled test, and only after the basics on this list are fixed. Ads magnify whatever your store already does. If the page or checkout loses people, more traffic just loses more of them.

Is it my theme?

Rarely on its own. A slow or confusing theme can hurt, but the usual causes are the wrong traffic, an unclear offer, missing trust signals and surprise costs at checkout. Check those first.