Visitors but no sales? Find out where your shoppers give up

If your Shopify store gets visitors but no sales, don't start by changing everything. First find the stage where shoppers give up. Every sale passes through the same steps: someone visits, looks at a product, adds it to the basket, starts checkout and pays. Your Shopify reports show how many sessions get through each step, and the step where the numbers fall away tells you what to fix.

A shop where few people look at products has a different problem from one where plenty add to basket and then stop. The fixes are different too. This guide shows how to read the numbers, then what to change at each stage.

Where to find the numbers in Shopify

In your Shopify admin, go to Analytics. The conversion breakdown shows sessions, then sessions where something was added to the cart, then sessions that reached checkout, then sessions that completed checkout. The product reports show how often each product is viewed, and the sessions reports show which pages people land on. Shopify renames and moves its reports from time to time, so if a name here doesn't match, search the reports list for "conversion", "sessions" or "product".

Look at a month of data at least, and longer if your shop is quiet. A store with a few dozen visits a week won't show a reliable pattern in a few days, and one or two orders either way change the picture completely.

Step 0: Is the traffic real?

Before blaming the shop, check the visitors. New stores in particular get lots of sessions that were never going to buy.

• Check sessions by location. If you sell in the UK and many visits come from countries you don't ship to, those visits won't convert.
• Check sessions by referrer or traffic source. Bots and spam often show as direct visits that leave straight away, or come from odd referring sites.
• Check which ads or posts the visits came from. A viral post or a cheap, broad ad campaign can bring lots of curious visitors with no intention of buying.
• Look at the pattern over time. A sudden spike of visits that all leave immediately is usually bots, not a problem with your shop.

If most of your sessions fail these checks, your shop may not have a conversion problem at all. It has a traffic problem. The work is reaching people who want what you sell, in places you deliver to.

Stage 1: Visitors don't look at products

If lots of people arrive but few view a product, they're leaving from the homepage or whichever page they landed on. Usually they can't quickly tell what you sell, or what they see doesn't match the ad or post that brought them.

• Show products on the first screen, not just a mood photo and a slogan
• Say what you sell, and who it's for, in plain words
• Send ads and posts to the page for the product they show, not the homepage
• Remove pop-ups that appear the moment someone arrives
• Make sure the main product types are one tap away in the mobile menu

Stage 2: People view products but don't add to basket

Here the product page has to do the job of a good shop assistant: show the thing properly, answer the questions, and make buying easy. Open your best-selling product on your phone and check each of these.

• Photos: several large images, from different angles, in use and showing the size
• Description: answers what a buyer would ask in a shop, such as size, material, what's included and care
• Delivery: the cost and how long it takes, shown near the price, not only at checkout
• Reviews: on the product page, even if there are only a few
• The add to basket button: large, high-contrast and visible without hunting, especially on phones
• Options: sizes and colours easy to choose, with a size guide where it matters
• Returns: a short line near the button saying how returns work

Stage 3: People add to basket but don't reach checkout

Something in the basket puts them off, or they were only saving things for later. The usual causes are a delivery charge they're seeing for the first time, a total that isn't clear, a checkout button that's hard to find on a phone, or a discount code box that sends them off looking for codes.

Our guide to people adding to basket and then leaving covers this stage, and checkout, in more detail.

Stage 4: People reach checkout but don't pay

Shopify's checkout is well tested, so problems at this stage usually come from your settings and from surprises rather than the checkout design itself.

• Delivery rates that are higher than people expected, or only appear at this point
• Payment methods your customers expect, such as PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay, that aren't turned on
• Account settings that make people sign in or create an account before they can pay
• Apps that add extra steps, pop-ups or slow the checkout down
• Prices, taxes or currency that look wrong to UK shoppers

Then test it yourself. Buy something cheap from your own shop on your phone, all the way through, and refund it afterwards. Note anything that surprised you, slowed you down or made you hesitate.

If you've had no sales at all

A brand-new store with very few visits doesn't have enough data to diagnose. If you've had a few hundred genuine sessions and no orders, look hard at trust first. Would you give your card details to this shop? New stores often have no reviews, a thin about page, no clear returns policy and a Gmail address. Fix those before you spend more on ads.

Fix one stage at a time

Pick the stage with the biggest drop, make two or three changes there, and give them a few weeks before you judge. If you change everything at once, you won't know what helped, and you won't know what to keep.

The free check below looks at one page of your shop, such as a product page, on desktop and mobile, and shows the top three problems with screenshots. It sees what your shoppers see on the page. It can't see your Shopify reports, so use those to decide which page to check first.