How to detect why your online store is not selling

You have traffic, good products… and, even so, the number of orders is frozen at the same figure.

Keep calm: before touching anything, it is well worth investigating a little and finding out where the sale is getting stuck, because it is not the same for people not to enter your store as for them to do so but leave without buying anything. There is no single problem, nor a single way of tackling the problem. Each case is fixed in a different way.

When a store is not selling, the typical reaction is to panic and start changing things like crazy. A discount from one day to the next, a new banner on the home page, another group of ads, hiring that influencer who offered last year...

Sometimes, some of that works by chance (and you will never know which of all those things it was), but most of the time you end u spending time and money putting out fires while creating other fires. The problem wasn’t the price: it was that the product page took forever to load on mobile. Or exactly the opposite.

Selling online is a chain. Someone discovers you, enters the website, looks at a product, puts it in the cart and pays. At each of those steps people drop off, and that is completely natural: no eCommerce in the world converts at 100%. What we should not normalize is not knowing in which part of the conversion funnel you are losing the majority.

And that is the good news in this article: you can detect why your store isn’t selling without being a technician, programmer, or anything of the sort, just with data you have in front of you and can check yourself.

This is the most important question, and one that many people do not even consider. Go into your store statistics (any analytics dashboard will do, from the one included with your own platform to Google Analytics) and answer an apparently innocent but critical question: how many people came in last week?

If 40 people came in over 7 days, you do not have a conversion problem. You have a traffic problem, and no matter how well you polish the buttons, you are unlikely to sell enough with only 40 visits. In that case the work is outside the website: search engine positioning, social media, email marketing, advertising... Everything that helps you attract.

But what happens if 3,000 came in and you were only able to close 2 orders? In that case, yes: the problem is inside your online store. People arrive and leave. That is the part you can act on from home, without depending on anyone to make a report for you or treat you as if you were stupid.

There is a key indicator for the health of your business: the conversion rate (conversion rate), that is, the percentage of visits that end in a purchase. In e-commerce, calculate that it usually ranges between 1% and 3%, but with a thousand nuances, depending on the sector and the price of the product. If you are well below that, with a decent level of traffic, you have plenty of room for improvement within the website. If you are around the average, but sell little in total, your problem is traffic volume, and I can tell you 100% that the solution is outside.

There are eCommerce stores with lots of visits that do not sell because they attract the wrong audience. And it is an especially treacherous case, because the analytics dashboard shows you a nice number of visits and makes you think that you are doing well.

It often happens when traffic comes from places that bring curious people, not buyers. A video that goes viral, a blog article that ranks for an informational search or because of a poorly segmented campaign. People come in, yes, but people who were looking for something else.

Let’s go with an example: if you sell premium running shoes, but most of your visits arrive looking for "cheap shoes", it is a fundamental problem that making the button bigger will not fix, nor will even a discount.

The good thing is that detecting it is easier than you think, just cross-reference two pieces of data that almost any dashboard gives you: where people come from (the channels) and how long they stay (retention and bounce). If a channel brings you lots of visitors who leave after 2 seconds, that channel is inflating the statistics “artificially” because it does not bring customers. It is almost always better to have a handful of visits from people looking for exactly what you sell than an avalanche of visits from people who happened to be passing by and came in out of curiosity, or, worse, who were attracted for the wrong reason.

This is the silent killer of websites, a traitor you do not see coming. It is not the same when you open the store from your computer, with Wi-Fi and the website stored in your browser cache, as when your customer opens it from their mobile, using data, with poor coverage and ten other tabs open consuming resources. It is not the same experience, not even close.

The numbers here are conclusive. According to the Google analysis reported in Think with Google, when a page goes from loading in 1 second to taking 10, the probability of the visitor leaving without interacting shoots up. And, take note of this figure, more than half of mobile users leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to appear. It is nothing personal, they simply leave before they even get to see what you sell. 

Checking it is free and requires no technical knowledge at all.

Tools such as GTMetrix or PageSpeed Insights, from Google itself, give you a score and, even better, tell you what is slowing down the page. 

It is almost always the same thing: huge images that haven’t been optimized. That five-megabyte product photo looks beautiful and is costing you sales every day. Compressing it does not reduce quality to the customer’s eye and gives seconds back to your store.

Just look at how much importance Google gives to loading speed: despite being a user experience metric, it turned it years ago into an SEO ranking factor, that is, it has a determining influence on the store’s positioning.

Put yourself in the shoes of a stranger who enters your product page without any prior context. Do you think that in 10 seconds they know what it is, how much it costs, when it will arrive and why they should trust you? Answer objectively, because if you hesitate when answering, your customer will too. And doubt, in an online store, usually translates into empty carts.

The problems here are usually fairly obvious, things like:

 

That last point carries much more weight than it seems when nobody knows you yet. A visible phone number, an "about us" page with a face and name, a clear and visible returns policy… None of this sells by itself, but its absence does put buyers off, and it does so silently: the customer does not write to you to tell you, they simply close the tab.

If people fill the cart and then disappear, you are close to the sale, but it slips through your fingers in the final stretch. Frustrating, yes, but it is also the easiest leak to plug, because the reasons have been thoroughly studied.

The Baymard Institute, which has spent more than a decade measuring shopping behavior, puts the average cart abandonment rate at around 70%. Put another way: 7 out of every 10 people who put something in the cart leave without actually completing the sale.

What happens when they are asked the reason? Leaving aside those who were only browsing, the causes are always repeated:

There is one Baymard figure that sums up the problem well: the average purchase form shows almost twice as many fields as necessary. Every extra field is a barrier where you are losing a certain percentage of users.

To sum up, in terms of best practices, the advice would be: show shipping costs as early as possible and not on the last click, allow people to buy as guests without forcing them to register, and trim the checkout form down to the essentials. Asking for a second surname or company name when it is not needed is costing you orders.

You do not need to hire anyone to start seeing where you are losing people. With three things, all with a free option, you have more than enough for a fairly accurate initial diagnosis:

With that, we leave the realm of hypothesis and move fully into the journey of a real person, and you locate those key pain points where most people are dropping off.

The fact is that there almost never is just one. What is usual is for a store to lose a little in each of these areas: somewhat weak traffic, a somewhat slow website, the odd confusing product page, a checkout with one step too many. It is rare for a single leak to be sinking you, but added together they turn what could be a reasonably efficient eCommerce into a problem.

The good thing about these multifactorial cases is that they also work the other way around: if you plug three small holes, you will see how the improvement shows in the overall result.

So, the next time you look at the order counter stuck, resist the temptation to dive headfirst into the pool of changes. Count to 10, breathe, open the statistics and ask yourself where people are leaving. The answer has almost always been sitting there for a while, waiting for someone to stop and look at it.