Shopify No Sales? 9 Reasons Your Store Is Not Selling
/ 4 min read / by Eroll Encabo
The short answer
A Shopify store with no sales has either a traffic problem or a conversion problem. If very few people visit, the fix is getting the right visitors through search, ads or social. If people visit and leave, the store is losing them somewhere: unclear product pages, weak trust, surprise shipping costs or a slow mobile experience. Check your analytics to see which you have before changing anything.
A store with no sales is demoralising, and the temptation is to change everything at once: new theme, new apps, new products. That usually makes it harder to see what was wrong. Start by finding out which kind of problem you have.
First: traffic or conversion?
Open Shopify Analytics and look at sessions and conversion rate over the last 30 days.
- Very few sessions: people are not finding the store. Start with reasons 1 to 3.
- Plenty of sessions, almost no sales: people arrive and leave. Start with reasons 4 to 9.
- Visitors adding to cart but not buying: the problem is in the checkout. Go straight to reasons 6 and 7.
When nobody is visiting
1. Nobody knows the store exists
A new store with no marketing gets no visitors. Shopify does not send you traffic; you have to bring it. That means search, ads, social media, email or partnerships, ideally more than one.
2. The traffic you get is the wrong traffic
Thousands of visitors from a viral post or cheap ads in the wrong country can look impressive and buy nothing. Check where visitors come from in your analytics. A few hundred people who were searching for what you sell are worth more than thousands who were not.
3. Google cannot find your products
Products with generic titles, copied manufacturer descriptions and no collection pages rarely rank. Unique product descriptions, clear titles and well-organised collections make the store findable.
When people visit but do not buy
4. The product pages do not answer the questions
Visitors cannot touch the product, so the page has to do everything. Good product pages have clear photos from several angles, sizing or dimensions, materials, delivery times, return terms and the answer to the question a hesitant buyer would ask.
5. Nothing says you can be trusted
A store nobody has heard of has to earn trust fast. Reviews, clear contact details, a real returns policy, secure checkout badges and an about page with real people behind it all help. A store with no reviews, no contact page and a stock-photo feel loses buyers who are ready to pay.
6. Shipping costs appear as a surprise
Baymard Institute's long-running checkout research has consistently found unexpected extra costs at checkout to be the most common reason people abandon a purchase. Show shipping costs early, ideally on the product page, or build them into the price.
7. The checkout asks too much
Forced account creation, long forms and missing payment methods all lose sales. Let people check out as guests and offer the payment methods your customers actually use.
8. The store is slow or awkward on a phone
Most visitors arrive on a phone. A slow store, a menu that is hard to use with a thumb or buttons too small to tap will lose sales you never see. Test the whole path to purchase on your own phone, not just the homepage.
9. The price or offer is not competitive
Sometimes the store is fine and the offer is the problem. Compare your price, shipping and returns with the alternatives a buyer would find in the same search. You do not have to be cheapest, but you do have to give a reason to buy from you.
Find out where they leave
Shopify's analytics show how many visitors reach each step: product page, add to cart, checkout, purchase. The step with the biggest drop is the one to fix first. A store where most people add to cart but few complete checkout has a very different problem from one where nobody adds to cart at all.
For a sense of what fixing the right problem can do, one Shopify store I worked with went from no revenue to $1,000 a day while its cost per acquisition fell from $90 to $28. The detail of each fix is in the ecommerce articles.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take for a new Shopify store to get its first sale?
There is no fixed time. With paid ads to a well-matched audience, a good store can sell within days. Relying only on organic search, it can take months. The deciding factor is how quickly you bring in the right visitors, not the platform.
What is a good conversion rate for a Shopify store?
It varies by product, price and traffic source, so compare yourself against your own trend rather than a universal number. More useful than the overall rate is where visitors drop out of the path to purchase, because that tells you what to fix.
Should I change my Shopify theme if I am not getting sales?
Rarely as a first step. A theme change takes time and seldom fixes the real problem, which is usually traffic quality, product pages, trust or shipping costs. Diagnose where visitors leave first, then fix that.
Do Shopify apps help increase sales?
Some do, particularly reviews and email, but every app adds weight and many slow the store down. Install apps to solve a specific problem you have identified, and remove the ones you are not using.