Why is my Shopify store not getting sales?

Open your analytics and look at sessions for the last thirty days, then at orders. That one comparison decides everything you do next, and most stores skip it and start redesigning.

If you had a few hundred sessions or fewer, you do not have a store problem yet. At typical conversion rates, that volume produces a handful of orders at best, and zero is well within normal. Redesigning the homepage will not change it. The work is getting more of the right visitors.

If you had a few thousand sessions and no orders at all, something is genuinely broken, and it is usually one thing rather than many. Zero orders on real traffic points at a blocker: a payment method that fails, a shipping rate that does not apply to the country the traffic is coming from, a checkout that errors on mobile, a product that cannot be added to cart, or a store still on a password page for some visitors.

If you had thousands of sessions and a few orders, you have an ordinary conversion problem and the rest of this page applies. Place a test order yourself first, on a phone, with a real card, before you believe any of the diagnosis below.

Break sessions down by source, because the total hides what is actually happening. A store with two thousand sessions that are all from one social post, or all from other countries you do not ship to, is in a different position from one with two thousand sessions from search.

The common patterns we see. All traffic is direct, which usually means it is you, your friends and your own devices, and none of it was ever going to buy. All traffic is from a channel that does not match the buying moment, such as a viral post that brought browsers rather than shoppers. Traffic is coming from countries the store does not ship to, which produces sessions with no possible orders. Or paid traffic is arriving on the homepage rather than the product it was advertising, and losing people in the two clicks between.

Fix the mismatch first, because it is free. Then choose one channel that matches how people actually look for your product, and fund it properly. For products people search for by name or category, that is usually Google Shopping, which means getting a clean product feed approved in Merchant Center before anything else.

Look at four numbers in order, and the one that falls off a cliff is your answer. Sessions to product views, product views to add to cart, add to cart to checkout started, checkout started to order.

Few product views means the entry page is not sending people anywhere. Usually a homepage or collection page with no clear path, or a paid landing page that does not show the advertised product above the fold.

Good product views and weak add-to-cart means the product page is not answering the buying questions. For most stores that is sizing or fit, materials or ingredients, what is actually in the box, delivery time, and what happens if it is wrong. Photos that show scale and use matter more than photos that show the product on white.

Good add-to-cart and weak checkout starts means cost surprise. Shipping cost or a duty appearing at the cart, after the price the shopper had in mind, is the most common cause of an abandoned cart there is.

Weak checkout completion means the checkout itself. Forced account creation, too few payment options for your market, or a slow step on a phone.

Some causes are not gradual. They take the order count to zero or near it, and they are worth ruling out in an hour before you spend a month on optimisation.

Payments. Check that a real card completes an order, and that the payment methods your buyers expect are enabled for the countries you sell to. A market where most people pay one way and that way is missing will look like a design problem and is not.

Shipping rates. If no rate applies to a customer's address, the checkout can stop dead. Test an address in each country you advertise to.

Stock and availability. Products marked unavailable, or a variant that is out of stock as the default selection, quietly kill a page.

Speed. A product page that takes many seconds to become usable on a phone loses people before they read anything.

Trust. No returns policy, no contact details, no reviews and stock photography together read as a store a stranger will not risk a card on. Fix the plain ones: a real address, a returns page in plain language, delivery times stated, and reviews collected from your first buyers.

Sometimes the store works, the pages are fine, and the traffic was simply the wrong traffic. This is common enough to check before rebuilding anything.

The signs are a low time on page across the board, a high share of visitors leaving from the landing page, and search terms or audiences that describe interest in the category rather than intent to buy. Someone searching for how to clean a thing is not the same visitor as someone searching to buy the thing, and a campaign that mixes them will look like a conversion problem.

Check the search terms your ads actually matched, not the keywords you chose. Check whether social traffic came from a post about the product or a post that entertained. Check the geography, the device split and whether the traffic arrived at three in the morning, which often means it is not human.

If the traffic is wrong, tighten it before you widen anything. Exclude the countries you cannot serve, point ads at the product page for the product in the ad, and add negatives for the informational searches. A smaller number of the right visitors is worth more than a larger number of the wrong ones, and it makes every other measurement readable.