Find your problem in five minutes
In your Shopify admin, go to Analytics, then Reports, and open Conversion rate breakdown. It shows how many visits you had (Shopify calls them sessions), how many added to cart, how many reached checkout and how many bought. Find your row:
| What your numbers show | What it means | Go to |
|---|---|---|
| Under 100 visitors, ever | You don't have a store problem yet. Almost nobody has seen it. | Get the right people in |
| Hundreds of visitors, no one adds to cart | They don't want it, don't trust it, or were never shoppers | Trust, then the page |
| Add to carts, but no one starts checkout | Something about the total put them off | The surprise at checkout |
| People start checkout, but no orders | Something broke, or the final cost was a shock | The surprise at checkout |
| Thousands of visitors, almost no activity | Many of them probably aren't real shoppers | Check who is visiting |
Here's something to calm you down. A typical established Shopify store gets about one order for every 77 visits. That comes from Littledata's numbers for 438 stores. A brand-new store usually does worse. So if you've had 40 visitors and no sale, nothing has gone wrong yet. After a few hundred real visitors with no sale, something has.
First, make sure people can actually buy
Do this before anything else. It takes two minutes, and it's the most painful thing to discover late. One owner posted on the Shopify forum after 376 visits, no sales and money already spent on outside help. A reply pointed out that every product was out of stock.
Pick up your phone and buy something from your own store with a real card. On the way, look for these:
- Your store is still private. Visitors see a landing page instead of your products. Shopify now calls this Private mode, and you turn it off under Online Store.
- Payments are still in test mode. Customers can't place real card orders while it's on.
- Products show as sold out. If you track quantity and never entered any, Shopify stops selling at zero.
- You don't ship where your visitors live. A customer's country has to be in an active market and a shipping zone with rates.
Refund yourself afterward. Some fees may not come back, so buy your cheapest product.
Get the right people in
"I have no sales" often turns out to mean "I have no visitors." You can have the best store on the internet, but it won't sell if nobody knows it's there. Linking your Instagram won't fix that. Neither will waiting for Google to send you visitors, which can take months. These will get you started sooner:
Message 20 people by hand. Skip your supportive aunt and pick people who'd really use the product. Tell them what you made and send the link to one product. Ask them to tell you honestly why they would or wouldn't buy it. You may get your first sale. You'll definitely get your first useful feedback.
Go where your customers already ask for help. Find the Facebook group, subreddit or forum where people talk about the problem your product solves. Read each group's rules first. Answer questions properly for a week before you mention your store. Pay attention to the words people use, because those words belong on your product page.
Turn on free listings. Shopify's Google and YouTube channel can put your products in Google's free shopping listings. It costs nothing to set up.
Run one small ad for one product. If you have a budget, spend only what you can afford to lose. Send people straight to the product page, not your homepage, because every extra click loses people. You're buying information at this stage, so don't expect the ad to pay for itself.
Check who is visiting
Plenty of traffic with nothing to show for it usually means the wrong visitors. Three quick checks:
- Are they real? Shopify filters out known bots but misses some. In Live View, a crowd pinned to Kansas usually means Shopify can't tell where they are. They're often bots, or people hiding their location.
- Can they buy? Open Sessions by location. One owner found that most visitors came from Germany, where the store didn't sell.
- Were they shopping? Someone who tapped a reel was watching videos a second ago. Someone who searched for your product was already looking to buy. The Performance by marketing channel report shows you which visitors do anything at all.
Fix the trust problem
Try a blunt test. Go look at stores you've actually bought from. Then look at yours. Do they have two products and no information? Would you give your card number to your store if you'd never heard of it?
Put your store next to three you trust and look for the differences. They usually come down to this:
- A real address. Use your own domain, not the myshopify.com one, and add a logo. A plain text logo is fine.
- Photos someone would actually zoom in on. Good light and a clean background beat a fancy camera. Blurry supplier photos give you away immediately.
- Proof a person is behind it. A real About page, your face if you can, and a contact email that works.
- Policies that are easy to find. Shipping and returns, written in plain words. Nervous first-time buyers check these.
- Reviews, honestly earned. Your first five matter most. Northwestern University researchers found shoppers were far more likely to buy a product with five reviews than one with none. Give your product to a few people in exchange for an honest opinion, and say that's how they got it. Don't buy reviews or write them yourself. It's illegal in the US, and experienced shoppers can smell it.
Fix the page
Open your best product page on your phone, since most visits come from phones. Show the first screen to a friend for five seconds, then take the phone away. Can they tell you what it is, who it's for, what it costs and when it would arrive? If not, fix that before you touch anything else.
Then check your price. Search for your product or the closest thing to it, and see what a shopper sees in one click. If the same item is cheaper on Amazon and arrives tomorrow, your page has to give them a reason to buy from you. Better words won't beat a worse deal. You may need a different price, a bundle or a different product.
Also write down what the product does for the buyer. "Organic cotton, 200 GSM" tells them what it is. "Still soft after 50 washes" tells them why they'd want it. If you sell several similar things, help people choose. Our guides for clothing stores and skincare brands go deeper on this.
The surprise at checkout
If people add to cart and then vanish, the usual cause is the total. Baymard surveyed US shoppers about why they leave a cart. Extra costs came first, ahead of slow delivery, not trusting the site with card details and being forced to create an account. So:
- Show shipping on the product page, or build it into the price.
- Say when it will arrive before the cart.
- Keep guest checkout on.
- Offer Shop Pay, Apple Pay or PayPal, so nobody has to find their card on the sofa.
If people get all the way to checkout and still no orders appear, look in Orders, then Abandoned checkouts. Failed payments show up there, not in your orders. So you may have had people trying to pay you all along. If most of your visitors use phones, the next job is to reduce Shopify mobile checkout abandonment.
Now stop guessing and ask them before they leave
Everything above is an educated guess about strangers. The people about to leave your store know exactly what's stopping them, and almost nobody asks them. Put one question on your best product page. Show it after someone has been there a while:
What's stopping you from buying today?
Give them tappable answers, because hardly anyone types on a phone. Then do something about what they say:
| They say | What to do |
|---|---|
| The price or shipping | Show the full cost sooner, try free shipping over a set amount, or look at who you're advertising to |
| I'm not sure it's right for me | Add sizing, comparisons or a clear "who it's for" |
| I need it sooner | Put delivery dates on the page, and offer faster shipping if you can |
| I'm not sure I can trust this store | Go back to the trust list above |
| I'm just looking | Nothing yet. That's normal, unless you're paying for those clicks. |
| Something else | Read these first. They're the reasons you didn't think of. |
Most survey apps in the Shopify App Store can do this. Make sure yours works on phones, because some popups that appear when people leave only work on computers. With little traffic, answers will come in slowly. So get some right away. Ask five people who could be customers to try buying on their phone while you watch and say nothing. It's uncomfortable, and you'll learn more in 20 minutes than from a month of reports. Nielsen Norman Group, which studies how people use websites, has a long-standing rule of thumb: five people will find most of a site's problems.
When your first buyers arrive, ask them too: what almost stopped you?
When the answer needs a reply right there
A survey tells you what's stopping someone, but they still leave. If people keep saying "I'm not sure it's right for me," they needed help while they were still on the page. That's what we built Possible to do, so take this with the obvious pinch of salt. Possible asks each visitor what they need, remembers what they say, and walks them to the right product. Here's more on our AI sales assistant for online stores. It's most useful when shoppers really have to choose. If you sell three products and the choice is obvious, fix everything above first. Our guide on Shopify product quiz placement shows where a question like this belongs.
What not to spend money on yet
Too many new owners spend first and learn later. One owner spent over $4,000 on freelancers for SEO, design and marketing before making a sale. They ended up with no budget and one abandoned cart. Until you've found your row in the table, hold off on these:
- A new theme or a redesign. Unless the store looks broken, it's rarely the reason.
- A stack of apps. You'll be told to buy them, often by the people who make them. Each app adds a monthly bill and can slow the store down.
- An SEO package. Getting found on Google is worth working on, but it won't rescue a store this month.
- A big discount. If visitors don't trust you, 20% off won't change their minds. It also teaches everyone else to wait.
- More ad spend. If the store isn't selling, more ads just get you the same result faster and at a higher price.
Your first week
- Today: Buy from your own store on your phone, and fix whatever gets in the way.
- Tomorrow: Find your row in the table. Check where your visitors come from.
- Day 3: Put your store next to three you trust, and fix the biggest gaps.
- Day 4: Watch five people try to buy. Rewrite the first screen of your best product page.
- Day 5: Show shipping and delivery before the cart. Add the one question.
- Days 6 and 7: Message 20 people who fit, and post something useful where your customers hang out.
Once the orders start, the work shifts from finding what's broken to conversion rate optimization, one tested change at a time. After that, the questions become how to increase sales on Shopify and how to increase ecommerce sales from the traffic you already have, and a small brand can start thinking about how to increase online store sales more broadly.
Questions about getting no sales on Shopify
Why am I getting visitors but no sales on Shopify?
Usually the visitors weren't ready to buy, don't trust a store they've never heard of, or got put off by the final cost. The Conversion rate breakdown report shows where they stop. That tells you which one to fix first.
How many visitors do I need to get a sale?
The typical established store gets about one order for every 77 visits. A new store should expect to need more. Judge it after a few hundred real visitors, not after 50.
How long does it take to get your first sale on Shopify?
There's no honest fixed number, so be wary of anyone who promises one. It depends much more on how many of the right people see your store than on how long it's been open. A store with 500 of the right visitors in a week learns more than a store with 50 visitors in three months.
Should I use paid ads or free traffic first?
Start with free: people you can message, and groups where your customers already are. You'll get better feedback, and it costs nothing. Add a small ad for one product once your own test purchase works and strangers have told you what's wrong.
Should I close my Shopify store if I've had no sales?
Not until you've tested it properly. Make sure people can buy, get a few hundred of the right visitors, and ask them what's stopping them. If people who really fit the product still say they don't want it, that's a useful answer. Change the product or the audience, and stop spending until you have.
The brands shown here are examples of how pages can look. They aren't Possible customers, and we haven't measured their sales. The drawn screens are ideas, not live stores.
Go deeper on conversion tactics.