Why your online store is not selling

Two thousand people visit the store every month and there are five orders. The problem is almost never traffic. It is that people abandon the cart exactly where something is missing.

Calculate the conversion rate first, then guess

Two thousand visits and five orders is a conversion rate of 0.25 percent. That is a diagnosis, not a feeling. Before you add advertising, calculate this one number and split it by mobile and desktop.

Then you need three numbers from Google Analytics: how many people viewed a product, how many added it to the cart and how many completed the order. If fifty out of a thousand product views end in the cart, the problem is on the product page. If two hundred add to the cart and ten pay, the problem is in the checkout.

Breaking it into three steps takes an hour and saves months of guessing. Without it you optimise blindly, changing the button colour while people drop off at a shipping fee. Write the numbers down once a month, because a trend says more than one good week in season.

Traffic without buying intent looks like success

Three thousand visits from Instagram are not the same as three hundred visits from someone searching “buy hand blown glass”. The first group browses, the second buys. If conversion dropped after a reach campaign, the store did not get worse, the statistics just mixed in people who did not come to buy.

Split your traffic sources into commercial and brand building. Google Shopping, price comparison sites and searches for specific products belong to the first group. Social media, the blog and direct visits to the second. Track conversion separately, otherwise the average hides what works.

Social media builds demand that a comparison site then harvests. Whoever measures only the last click loses sight of this role and switches off exactly what fills their carts.

An unknown store must create trust right at the product

Someone who has never heard of you looks for a reason not to trust you. A missing address, a single photo from the supplier's catalogue and contact only through a form are enough to make them compare prices elsewhere and never come back. For goods over a few thousand crowns the barrier is even higher, because the risk is real and returns are annoying.

Trust is not created on the About page nobody reads. It is created at the point of decision: on the product page and in the cart, where availability, delivery date, returns and a phone number to a real person should be visible. A phone number raises conversion even among people who never call, because it says someone stands behind the store.

• Six to eight of your own product photos including detail and scale
• Availability as a number, “4 in stock”, not a generic “in stock”
• A delivery date, not “2 to 5 working days”
• Reviews right at the product, ideally with a customer photo
• Phone and company ID in a visible part of the page, not only the footer
• The 14 day return policy summarised in one sentence next to the button

Shipping and payment decide in the last thirty seconds

The most common reason for abandoned carts has been the same for years: a shipping cost that appears only in the last step. When an item has an added delivery and payment fee at the very end, the customer feels tricked, even if the total is still reasonable.

The fix is to show shipping earlier. One line on the product page with the cheapest delivery price and the free shipping threshold is enough. At the same time offer the payments people want: card, fast bank payment and, for new customers in some markets, cash on delivery, which still wins at a first purchase in an unknown store.

A price nobody can compare does not sell

If the same product is cheaper on a comparison site and you give no reason to pay more, you lose. The reason does not have to be a discount: a longer warranty, service, local stock, instructions in the customer's language or free size exchanges. But it must be written next to the price, not hidden in the terms.

The second trap is the discount loop. A permanent red price tag teaches customers to wait for a sale. After six months nothing sells at full price. Bundles, a gift with orders over a threshold and a loyalty discount on the second purchase work better. The margin survives and the customer still feels they got something extra.

With your own production, do not lower the price, explain it. A sentence about how many hours one set takes, who makes it and why it cannot be mass produced sells better than a percentage off. A photo of work in progress does the same. A customer who understands what they pay for does not haggle.

Fix it step by step, from where people disappear

Fix from the back. First the checkout, because that is where people who already wanted to buy drop off. Then the product page, then categories and only at the end traffic. Each step has its own number and its own fix, so you can see what worked. Change five things at once and you cannot tell which one helped.

In practice, shortening a checkout from four steps to two is often a day of work, and adding availability and delivery date to the product page is a template change. If the platform does not allow it, a custom store with payments, orders and invoices starts at CZK 79,900 (Empire System). More in how to choose an e-commerce platform.

• Remove mandatory registration and allow guest checkout
• Show the shipping price on the product page
• Shorten the checkout to two steps and one screen on mobile
• Send an abandoned cart reminder after an hour and again after 24 hours
• Add reviews and your own photos to the twenty best selling items
• Track product view, add to cart and purchase events