Your shop has visitors but no orders

A shop with visitors and no orders feels like the worst possible outcome, because the hard part appears to be working. It is usually one of a small number of specific faults, and most of them are visible in an afternoon if you look in the right order.

Are the sales actually missing?

Before diagnosing anything, confirm the zero is real. Orders that arrive but are not recorded look identical to orders that never happened, and the fix is completely different.

Place a real order yourself, all the way through, with a real card. Then check that it appears in your shop admin, that you received the notification email, and that the customer receipt arrived. If any of those are missing, you have a plumbing problem rather than a selling problem, and nothing else in this article applies until it is fixed.

This sounds obvious and it is regularly the answer. A checkout that fails silently at the last step is the single most expensive fault a shop can have, because every other number looks healthy while it happens.

Does the delivery cost appear too late?

The most common reason a full basket is abandoned is a delivery cost that shows up at the end. It is not only the amount. It is the feeling of having been quoted one price and then charged another, which reads as a small dishonesty even when it is not one.

Put the delivery cost where it can be seen before the basket. On the product page, in the header, on a banner — anywhere that means the number at checkout is a confirmation rather than a surprise.

If your delivery cost is genuinely high, say why in a sentence. A stated reason is easier to accept than a number that appears from nowhere.

Do visitors know who you are?

A stranger arriving from an advert has no reason to believe you exist next week. Everything that makes you look like a real business is doing conversion work, even the parts that feel like admin.

The specifics that matter: a real address and a way to contact a human, a returns policy written in plain words, delivery timescales stated as a range, and payment methods people recognise. None of it is glamorous and all of it is load-bearing.

Do not fabricate reassurance. Invented reviews and fake urgency are noticed more often than the people using them believe, and the damage lasts longer than the sale.

Does the product page answer the buyer's question?

Most product pages describe the product. Fewer answer the question the buyer is actually holding, which is usually about size, fit, material, compatibility, or how long it takes to arrive.

The fastest way to find those questions is to read the messages you already get. Every enquiry that asks something the page should have answered is a page that will lose the buyers who did not bother to ask.

Photographs do most of this work. Something in shot for scale, the item in use, and the detail people worry about, shown close up.

Is the shop slower or more broken than you think?

You browse your own shop on a good connection, on a device you own, with the images already cached. Your visitors do not. Most of them are on a phone, often on mobile data, and they leave long before they would describe the site as slow.

Open the shop on your own phone, on mobile data, not on your home wifi. Then do the whole thing: find a product, add it, and check out. Faults that are invisible on a laptop tend to be obvious within a minute of doing this.

Pay particular attention to anything that covers the screen. Pop-ups and cookie banners that are awkward to dismiss on a small screen quietly remove a share of every visitor you paid for.

Are you buying the wrong visitors?

Traffic is not one thing. Somebody searching for your exact product and somebody who tapped an advert out of curiosity behave nothing alike, and a shop can look broken simply because the visitors were never close to buying.

Check where the visitors came from and how long they stayed. If a source sends people who leave in seconds, the shop is not the problem, and improving product photographs will not fix it.

This is worth settling before spending money on redesign. Rebuilding a shop that converts fine for the wrong audience is expensive and changes nothing.

How do you work out which one it is?

Take the list in order. Test a real order first, because it invalidates everything else. Then look at where people stop: if they never reach the basket, the problem is upstream in the product page or the audience; if they reach the basket and vanish, it is almost always delivery cost or checkout friction.

Change one thing at a time and give each change enough orders to mean anything. A shop with a handful of sales a week cannot tell you whether a button colour mattered, and pretending otherwise leads to a lot of confident, wrong conclusions.

What to do next

Place a real order today, on your own phone, on mobile data. That one exercise finds broken checkouts, delivery-cost surprises and mobile faults in a single pass, and it costs you the price of one item. Fix what it turns up before you spend anything on redesign or more traffic. If the check turns up a single thing you would rather not fix yourself, a Shopify Fix covers one bug or small change on an existing store.

Common questions