There are exactly three reasons a store does not sell: nobody arrives, the wrong people arrive, or the right people arrive and leave. They look identical from the dashboard and need completely different fixes.
- Check visitor count before anything else. Under a few hundred a month, you have a traffic problem and nothing else is measurable.
- With traffic but no sales, look at whether the visitors match what you sell.
- Only after both are ruled out should you touch the store itself.
How do I tell which problem I have?
By visitor volume first, because it decides whether anything else can even be measured.
| Monthly visitors | What it means | Where to spend effort |
|---|---|---|
| Under 300 | Discovery problem. Conversion cannot be assessed | Getting found at all |
| 300 to 2000, no sales | Probably a match problem | Who is arriving and what they wanted |
| Over 2000, few sales | Now examine the store | Product pages, pricing, trust, checkout |
What if almost nobody arrives?
Then you have the problem most new stores have, and no change to the store will register. Testing button colours on forty visitors produces noise, not information.
Everything in the traffic diagnosis applies here. Fix discovery, get to a volume where numbers mean something, then optimise.
What if people arrive and do not buy?
Check who they are before assuming the store is at fault. Traffic from a viral post or a broad ad audience is mostly curiosity. Traffic from someone searching for exactly what you sell is intent. The same conversion rate means very different things across those two.
Buyers arriving from AI answers behave differently again: fewer, later in their decision, and with expectations set by whatever the assistant said about you. Landing pages for AI traffic covers meeting them properly.
What should you check on the store itself?
Once volume justifies it, in this order.
- Does the product page answer the questions a buyer asks before paying: sizing, materials, delivery, returns?
- Is the price visible without interaction, and is stock status accurate?
- Is there evidence anyone else has bought successfully? Reviews serve buyers and assistants at the same time.
- Can somebody complete checkout on a phone without creating an account?
Common questions
What conversion rate should I expect?
Ecommerce commonly sits in low single digit percentages, but the number is meaningless below a few hundred visitors a month. At low volume you are reading noise.
Should I lower my prices?
Rarely the first move. Price is the easiest thing to blame and usually not the constraint. Rule out traffic volume and traffic match first.
How long should I give a new store?
Judge discovery in months and conversion only once volume supports it. Most stores abandon the discovery work right before it would have started compounding.
Run a free scan and get a 0 to 100 score with a fix list in priority order. Run the free scan.
Your buyers are already asking AI. This is how you make your website readable to the assistants they ask.
Everything in this article is measurable on a live storefront. The Full Assessment and Roadmap reads your website the way AI crawlers receive it and hands you every fix in plain English, in the order we would make them.