Shopify store getting no sales? Start with these checks
When a Shopify store has visitors and no sales, the cause is usually the wrong traffic, a store that turns buyers away, or tools that are quietly broken. Check them in that order.
Start with where the visitors come from
Most stores with traffic and no sales are paying for that traffic. Look at the orders you do get and where each one came from, using the landing page and referrer on the order, not the ad platform's report. If most of your sessions come from paid social and almost none of your orders do, the ads are sending people who click and do not buy. That is a traffic problem, and no amount of work on the product page fixes it.
Read your own orders by channel
Every platform reports on itself, and every one of them reports a win. Your order records are the referee. On one store, Facebook ad spend and an ad vendor cost $1,700 a month and brought in about $2,177 a month in sales, before paying for the product. The same store's email platform credited itself with 14 orders and $6,813 over four weeks, while the store's own records showed 9 orders and $1,858 that actually arrived from an email link. Until you read the orders yourself, you do not know what is selling.
Check the store is not turning buyers away
If the right people are arriving and still not buying, the store is stopping them: price, shipping cost, shipping time, missing trust signals, or a broken page. Look at checkout starts against completed orders. On one store there were 46 checkout starts and 35 completed orders in a month, about 80 percent, which meant checkout was not the problem and the effort belonged somewhere else.
Check the tools that should be selling for free
Most established stores already have the tools that bring in orders without an ad bill, and some of them are switched off without anyone knowing. Confirm your best products are published to the Google and YouTube channel so they can appear in free Google listings. On one store the three highest value products had never been submitted. Confirm your email flows are actually sending: one store's 13 email sequence showed live while it had sent 7 emails in 90 days. And check how many visitors the store can identify at all. On that store it was about 0.8 percent, which capped every email flow.
If the store is brand new
A new store with almost no traffic has a different problem. Before conversion, it needs to be found: products listed on Google, pages that can rank, and a reason for someone to come back. The checks above still apply, they just come after getting found.
What fixing it looked like on one store
On a direct to consumer beef brand already doing real revenue, turning on and checking those tools took web sales from $6,546 a month to $11,192 in August, up 71 percent. Sales from organic channels went from $1,939 a month to $5,422, and their share of sales from 30 percent to 48 percent. The ads kept running. They just stopped carrying everything.
If this sounds like your store
This is what Shopify store audit fixes. See it on one store, with the before and after, in the case study.