Shopify Traffic but No Sales? How to Find the Problem

Check the numbers mean what you think

First, make sure there's enough traffic to judge. If a store converted one in every 100 sessions, 150 sessions would produce one or two orders. A week with no sales at that volume can be bad luck rather than a broken store.

Then check the traffic is real. See where sessions come from in Shopify's Sessions by referrer report and in the UTM tags on your ads, and look for spikes from unknown sources or from countries you don't ship to. Bots and accidental clicks add sessions that were never going to become orders.

Find the step where shoppers leave

Open the Conversion rate breakdown report in Shopify Analytics. It follows sessions through four steps:

1. All sessions
2. Sessions with cart additions
3. Sessions that reached checkout
4. Sessions that completed checkout

Compare each step with the one before it. The biggest drop is where to start, and the next three sections cover what each one usually means.

Visitors leave without adding to cart

This drop has two possible causes: the wrong visitors, or a page that doesn't convince the right ones. Check the traffic first, because no page converts people who were never going to buy.

Check the traffic

• The campaign's goal. Ads optimized for traffic or link clicks find people who click, not people who buy. For a store, optimize for purchases, or for add to cart while you're still building data.
• Placements. Break results down by placement in Ads Manager. Placements that bring lots of cheap clicks and no add-to-carts are worth excluding.
• Location. Make sure ads only run where you deliver.
• The ad's promise. If the ad shows a product or a discount, the page it opens should show the same thing straight away.

Check the page

• The landing page. Send ad traffic to the product or collection the ad shows, not the home page.
• Speed on a phone. Open the page on mobile data. If the product takes a long time to appear, plenty of visitors won't wait. PageSpeed Insights shows what's slowing it down.
• Price and delivery. Show the price clearly, and say what delivery costs and how long it takes before anyone has to hunt for it.
• Photos and details. Clear photos from several angles, sizes or variants that are easy to choose, and answers to the questions people would ask in a shop.
• Trust. For a brand people don't know yet: reviews if you have them, a clear returns policy, and a visible way to reach you, such as WhatsApp.

Carts, but no checkouts

People who add to cart want the product. When they stop at the cart, something surprised or blocked them:

• Delivery fees or a minimum order amount that only appear in the cart.
• A prominent discount code box that sends people off to search for a code.
• A cart drawer or cart page that breaks on some phones, often after an app or theme change.
• Upsell pop-ups that get in the way of the checkout button.

Add a product to the cart on your own phone and go through to checkout. Then do it again on an older or smaller phone. This step is easy to break without anyone on the team noticing.

Checkouts started, but not completed

• Payment options. If your customers expect cash on delivery and you don't offer it, some will leave here. If you take card payments, check that your payment provider works, including the bank's verification step.
• Shipping rates. Make sure there's a rate for every area you deliver to. An address with no shipping option is a dead end.
• Unexpected costs. Anything added at checkout that wasn't mentioned earlier.
• Required fields. Ask only for what you need to deliver the order.

Place a real test order with every payment method you offer, then cancel it and refund any card payment. Your Shopify admin's list of abandoned checkouts also shows what people had in their carts when they left.

Is it the traffic or the store?

A quick way to tell is to compare sources. If visitors from your Instagram profile, direct visits or Google searches for your brand buy, but visitors from paid ads don't, the store works and the ads are bringing the wrong people or promising the wrong thing. If nobody converts from any source, look at the store, the offer and the price first.

It can also be both. That's why it helps when the people running the ads can see, and change, the page they're sending traffic to. If the ads are the problem, our guide to testing ad creative is the next read.

A checklist for one afternoon

1. Click your own ad on a phone and follow it all the way to checkout.
2. Run your top landing page through PageSpeed Insights and fix the biggest problems it lists.
3. Check that the price, the delivery fee and the delivery time are visible on the product page.
4. Place a test order with every payment method, including cash on delivery if you offer it.
5. Check that shipping rates cover every area you deliver to.
6. Remove apps you don't use, then test the product page and cart again.
7. Ask someone who has never seen the store to buy something, and watch without helping.

When to get help

If the drop is on the product page or in the cart, the fix is usually in the store. If paid traffic doesn't convert while other traffic does, it's in the ads or the creative. Boostify works on both: Shopify Development for the store, Meta Ads for the campaigns, and Ad Creative for what people see before they click.