How to increase sales on Shopify: 15 fixes ranked by effort

Here's the whole list on one screen.

The times are my estimates for a small store with one person doing the work.

First, spend five minutes finding your weakest number

Your sales come from three numbers multiplied together: visits, the share of visits that buy, and the size of the average order. Shopify calls visits "sessions." Raise any one of them by 10% and your sales rise 10%. The difference is the cost. Ten percent more visits usually means an ad bill. A checkout fix keeps paying for free.

Take a store with 5,000 visits a month. Littledata's numbers say a typical Shopify store gets 1.3 orders per 100 visits, with an average order of $111. That's 65 orders and $7,215 a month. Add 10% to any of the three and you make about $720 more. Only one of those three needs you to buy more clicks.

Now look at your own numbers. In your admin, go to Analytics, then Reports, click the Category filter and choose Behavior. Open Conversion rate breakdown. It shows how many visits added to cart, reached checkout and bought.

One warning: Shopify changed how it counts visits from September 21 to 23, 2026. Your numbers may have moved even though shoppers didn't change. So compare periods that both fall after that date.

Then use your numbers to choose where to start:

What you sell matters, so don't panic at someone else's number. Typical fashion and home stores get about 1 order per 100 visits. Beauty stores get about 2.6. If your report shows no orders at all, that's the no sales on shopify problem, and it needs different checks from this list.

Fixes that take minutes

1. Buy from your own store on your phone

Use a real card, your cheapest product and your phone, because a typical store gets 66% of its visits from phones. Cancel and refund the order afterward, though your payment provider may charge a fee. A test mode won't catch everything, and Shop Pay can't be tested without a real order.

Note each moment you sigh. Baymard surveyed US shoppers about why they left a cart. Leaving aside people who were only browsing, 17% left because of site errors or a crash. So this is worth ten minutes even if your store looks fine on your laptop. While you're at it, make sure your payment provider isn't still in test mode. Real orders can't go through while it is.

2. Stop forcing sign-in at checkout

In the same survey, 18% of those shoppers left because a site wanted them to create an account. Go to Settings, then Checkout, and find Customer contact method. Turn off "Require customers to sign in to their account before checkout" if it's on.

This setting does a second kind of damage that's easy to miss. While it's on, Shopify hides fast options such as Apple Pay from the online store cart.

3. Turn on Shop Pay

Shop Pay saves a customer's email, payment method and shipping details. Anyone who has already signed up on another Shopify store can use it on yours. It comes with Shopify Payments. To turn it on, go to Settings, then Payments, click Manage in the Shopify Payments section, check Shop Pay and click Save.

Shopify says an outside study found it got up to 50% more people to buy, compared with guest checkout. That's the company's own write-up, and "up to" means your result may be lower. But it costs you nothing to switch on.

4. Turn on the abandoned checkout email

Go to Apps, then Messaging, then Automations. Click View templates, choose Abandoned checkout, then Turn on automation. Shopify charges for Messaging based on how many messages you send.

Three details to check:

• It may be reaching almost nobody. By default it only goes to people subscribed to your email marketing. You can change the To: field to All customers. If you sell in the EU or UK, check the rules on that first.
• The switch is one way. Once you move to this version, you can't go back to the older email in Settings. That's fine for almost everyone, but you should know before you click.
• Phone-only shoppers won't get it. If checkout lets people give a phone number instead of an email, there's no address to send it to. Keep that in mind when you set your contact method.

Keep the first email short and friendly. Shopify's own suggestion is a reminder within an hour, reviews at 24 hours and, if needed, a small discount at 48 to 72 hours. I'd try it without the discount first, so regulars don't learn that leaving pays.

Here's an opening you can steal:

Subject: You left this behind

Email: Your [product] is still here. If something stopped you, just reply to this email and a real person will answer.

That reply line matters. The answers will tell you what to fix next.

5. Set a free shipping minimum

Go to Discounts, then Create discount, then Free shipping, and choose Automatic discount under Method. Under Minimum purchase requirements, enter your amount. The title you type shows in the cart and at checkout, so call it something clear like "Free shipping over $60."

Set it a bit above your average order. If your average is $48 and shipping costs you $6, a $60 minimum asks each customer for one small extra item. Check your profit first. Shopify counts only product prices toward the minimum, and it counts them after other discounts. So a discount code can knock someone back under your minimum.

Then say it in your announcement bar. Otherwise it's just a nice surprise for people who were buying anyway.

Fixes that take an hour or two

6. Show the full cost and delivery date before the cart

Leave out the people who were only browsing, and this is the biggest reason in Baymard's survey. Of those shoppers, 40% blamed extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees. Another 20% said delivery was too slow, and 12% couldn't work out the total up front.

So open the theme editor and put a line like this right under the price on your product page:

Free shipping over $60, otherwise $6. Arrives in 3 to 5 days. Free returns within 30 days.

Use your real numbers, obviously. Then check that your return and shipping policies say the same thing, because 13% of those shoppers left over the returns policy. Shopify can write these policies from your settings. You're still responsible for what they say.

7. Fix the first phone screen of your best product page

Open your best seller on your phone and show the first screen to someone for five seconds. Then take the phone back and ask what it is, who it's for and what it costs. If they can't say, rewrite that screen before you touch anything else.

Three rewrites that usually help:

• Lead with what it does for the buyer. "Stainless steel, 750 ml" describes the bottle. "Keeps water cold through a 12-hour shift" gives someone a reason to want it.
• Use a photo that answers a doubt. Show it in someone's hand, on a body or next to something familiar.
• Say who it's for. "For dry, sensitive skin" helps the right person and politely sends the wrong one elsewhere. That also saves you a return.

Do this page first. Then work outward using the Sessions by landing page report, which is in the same Behavior list.

8. Fix the searches that find nothing

People who use your search bar are telling you exactly what they want. In the Behavior reports, open Searches with no results and then Searches with no clicks.

You'll find two kinds of gap. If shoppers type "sofa" and you call it a "couch," put their word in the product title or description. You can also tell the free Search & Discovery app that both words mean the same thing. If they keep asking for something you don't sell, you've just received free product research.

9. Add one good add-on to your top products

Install Shopify Search & Discovery, then go to Apps, then Search & Discovery. Click Product recommendations and then Add recommendations. Pick a product and choose the items that go with it.

Shopify's own advice is to pick add-ons that cost the same as the main product or less. A $6 cleaning cloth with a $30 pair of glasses feels like an easy extra. Your theme needs a complementary products section for this to appear, so check your product page after saving. Sold-out items won't show in that list.

10. Build one bundle

Shopify Bundles is free on all plans. Start with whatever people already buy together. You can spot this by reading your last 50 orders.

Know two quirks before you launch. A bundle's price doesn't change when the price of an item inside it changes, so you have to update it by hand. And a product or collection discount has to include the bundle itself. Selecting only the items inside it won't apply the discount.

Fixes that take an afternoon or a few days

11. Get your first five reviews on each top product

Northwestern University researchers found shoppers were almost four times as likely to buy a product with five reviews as one with none. The boost fades quickly after those first five, and it's stronger on higher-priced items. So don't chase hundreds of reviews on one product while your other products have none.

Shopify suggests asking seven to 10 days after delivery. Try this:

How's the [product] working out? If you have 30 seconds, a line about what you use it for would help the next person decide.

Don't panic about the odd four-star review. In the same research, people were usually most likely to buy at ratings between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. They were less likely as a rating neared a perfect 5.0. Shoppers are no fools. Keep it honest, too: US rules ban fake reviews and buying them, including ones written by AI.

12. Remove the apps that are slowing you down

From your admin, go to Online Store. The performance summary on the Themes page shows how fast your pages load, how quickly they respond and whether things jump around. The full reports show how installing apps and updating your theme changed those numbers. So you can see which change hurt.

Look at the mobile view first. Then uninstall each app you no longer use. Check the report again after a few days, because Shopify says this data can run up to 36 hours behind. Shrink your largest product images while you're there. Paying someone for a speed project can wait until you've done this free part.

13. Start an email list with a welcome message

Shopify Forms is free and gives you pop-up sign-up forms and forms that sit on the page. Connect it to a welcome automation in Shopify Messaging, and every sign-up gets a message without you lifting a finger.

A discount is the usual bait, and Shopify suggests 10% to 15% off. If you'd rather protect your profit, offer something useful such as a sizing guide or a first-time buyer's checklist. Then write one follow-up for people who've bought. Time it to when the product runs out or when a matching item makes sense. Second orders need no ad money at all.

14. Ask visitors what's stopping them

Everything above is an educated guess about people you've never met. So ask them. Add one question to your best product page, shown after someone has been there a while. The pop-ups in Shopify Forms from fix 13 are a place to start:

What's stopping you from buying today?

Offer short answers to choose from if your tool allows it: the price or shipping, not sure it's right for me, need it sooner, not sure I trust this store, just looking, something else. Baymard found 42% of US shoppers had left a cart because they were just browsing. So expect plenty of "just looking," and don't take it personally.

Then look for what keeps coming up. Price answers point to fixes 5 and 6. Trust answers point to fixes 7 and 11. "Not sure it's right for me" is the hard one for a page that can't talk back, because every shopper's doubt is slightly different.

If that answer keeps coming up, you need something that replies while they're still on the page. Shopify Inbox is a free place to start, with an AI helper that answers questions from your products and policies. We also built our own product for this, so take this with a pinch of salt. Possible is an AI built on real sales psychology. It asks each visitor the right question at the right moment, remembers the answers and guides them to a sale. It's free to start, and you can read more about our AI sales assistant for online stores. If you sell three products and the choice is obvious, finish fixes 1 to 13 first.

The fix that takes weeks

15. Bring in more of the right visitors

This is last on purpose. More visitors multiply whatever your store already does, including everything that's broken. Once the fixes above are in, here's the cheapest order to try:

1. Free Google listings. Install the Google & YouTube channel. Eligible US stores can show products in the Google Shopping tab for free.
2. Your own people. Shopify surveyed 500 established store owners in 2025 about how they grew in their first year. The most common answers were word of mouth (53%) and being active on social media (35%). Ask your best customers who else they'd tell, then give them something to pass on.
3. Rewritten page titles. Use the words buyers type on your top collection and product pages. Your Searches by search query report is a good source of those words.
4. A very small ad test. Shopify suggests $5 to $10 a day on one platform. Send people to the product page. Judge it by real orders, not likes.

In that same survey, stores earning over $1 million were more likely to name paid ads as their top way to grow (31%). Stores earning under $100,000 said unpaid social media and a wider range of products worked best. So ads tend to come later, and you can stop feeling guilty that you haven't cracked them.

What to leave alone for now

Some popular advice costs too much for what it does at this stage.

• A redesign. Unless the store looks broken, it rarely fixes what your report shows. It can also break what's working.
• A stack of new apps. Each one brings a monthly bill and more code for fix 12 to clean up.
• Sitewide discounts. They train people to wait. If a big sale really is coming, do fixes 1 to 6 before the rush, because black friday conversion depends on a checkout that works.
• Fake urgency. Countdown timers that reset and "before" prices nobody ever paid will cost you the trust you built in fix 11.

How to tell whether a fix worked

Change one thing at a time and note the date. Compare the same number for the two weeks before and the two weeks after, on the same days of the week. Watch the step that fix should move. A checkout fix should show up in completed checkouts before it shows up anywhere else.

With a small store, numbers bounce around. If you get 40 orders a month, a good week can simply be a good week. So judge by what you see over a month and by what customers tell you. Once you've worked through this list, the wider ideas in how to increase online store sales and general ecommerce best practices are the natural next stop.

Questions about increasing Shopify sales

Go deeper on conversion tactics.