Traffic but no sales Shopify: find the step

A session is one visit, and a store can have steady sessions and still sell nothing if every visit stops at the same screen. The cause sits in one of three places. The product page may not let a shopper pick the size they want, so the add to cart button stays off. The cart may show a cost that only grows later. Or the checkout may stop on a field, a payment option or a country the store does not ship to. Each one looks the same in the sales report: visits, then nothing. Only the step where visits end tells them apart.

• Sessions by device: are most of them phone visits that never reach a product page?
• The storefront password setting: is the store still closed to visitors who are not logged in?
• Add to cart for every variant, in each size and color, on a phone
• Shipping cost for each country your ads reach, shown in the cart and not only at checkout
• The checkout's first field and payment options on a phone, in a private window

Start at the top, because a closed store explains everything at once. A storefront password, an unpublished theme or a product that is not on the online store shows visitors something other than the shop. Open a private window, which has no admin login, and go to your homepage and to one product page from an ad link. If you see a password screen or a product marked unavailable, the sessions are counted while the store stays out of reach. Fix that first. Analytics will keep counting the visits until the shop opens.

Owners test the product they know. Visitors test the one they want, and that is often a color or size nobody checked. An out of stock variant, a size with no price or a swatch that does not update the selection can leave the add to cart button disabled, or put the wrong product in the cart. On a phone the button can also sit under a sticky bar or a cookie banner. Open three variants in a private window, on a phone, and try to add each one. A variant that will not add is a leak that no amount of traffic can fill.

A shopper who sees one price on the product page and a larger total at the end does not blame the shipping. They leave. Many stores show delivery only at checkout, and some have no shipping rate set for the country a campaign targets, so checkout shows no delivery option at all. Look at the total the shopper sees in the cart, not only the price on the product page. Then enter a delivery address in a country your ads target and check that a shipping option appears before the payment step.

Checkout flow testing

Themes, apps and currency settings are updated by people other than you, and any update can change the product page or the cart button. Send the same shoppers through after each change, including every variant and a phone. When shoppers must sign in, check the checkout with a test account. Recheck shipping whenever you add a country to your ads, and give each new market its own run.