Oct 10 2025
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Why Your Shopify Store Isn’t Making Sales & And How To Fix It
You’ve invested time and money into your Shopify store. The design of the site looks professional, your products are ready, but the sales aren’t coming, or there’s not enough of them to make it sustainable as a business. If you’re wondering why your Shopify store isn’t making sales, you’re not alone, and more importantly, the issue is almost always fixable.
After 15 years in ecommerce consultancy, I’ve diagnosed my fair share of underperforming stores across Shopify, Magento and WordPress. The good news is that most problems fall into predictable categories that you can address one-by-one.
Let’s walk through the critical areas that could be holding your store back.
1. Your Store Isn’t Being Found (Technical SEO Issues)
Check Google Search Console for Indexing Problems
Before anything else, verify that Google can actually find and index your store. Log into Google Search Console and check:
- Pages tab: Are your product pages showing as indexed or excluded?
- Coverage errors: Look for “Discovered – currently not indexed” or “Crawled – currently not indexed“
- Mobile usability issues: Google prioritises mobile-first indexing
Action step: Submit your sitemap if you haven’t already (found at yourstore.myshopify.com/sitemap.xml) and request indexing for key pages that aren’t appearing.
On the screenshot above, you can see one of the issues I found with a retailer in 2025. Their sitemap had been submitted to GSC as sitexml instead of sitemap.xml, therefore creating a “couldn’t fetch” warning that nobody had acted upon. After adding the correct sitemap, 4,382 pages were miraculously referenced.
Inspect Your robots.txt File
A robots.txt file helps to instruct crawlers to understand what they can / can’t visit on your site. A misconfigured robots.txt file can accidentally block search engines from crawling crucial pages.
- Visit: yourstore.com/robots.txt
- Look for any Disallow rules that might be blocking important sections
- Shopify’s default robots.txt is usually fine, but theme customisations or apps can modify it
Red flag: If you see Disallow: / or blocking of /collections/ or /products/, you’ve found a big problem as Google is being instructed to ignore your categories and/or products.
As an additional helper, there’s a free robots.txt checker that you can use to see if there is any issues occurring. Still not sure, ask AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to help you check that it’s ok. Beyond that, use an expert in technical SEO such as myself.
Non-Customised Meta Titles and Descriptions
Generic meta titles like “Product Name | Your Store” isn’t enough competitive niches. Each page needs:
- Unique, keyword-rich titles (50-60 characters)
- Compelling meta descriptions (150-160 characters) that include target keywords AND encourage clicks
- Product-specific language rather than template-generated text
Think of these as your storefront display. They are what potential customers see in Google search results and lead to them visiting or not visiting your store. Stop relying on Shopify creating your meta descriptions from the description of the product. It’s not enough to compete with your competitors.
Weak On-site and Off-Site SEO
On-site SEO is not just meta titles and descriptions. It includes your site hierarchy, how it all links from top to bottom. Do your most important pages get linked to in the right places on your site to drive traffic to them? Do products link to categories? Do categories link to other popular categories? These are all ranking signals to Google to understand the importance of each page.
Off-site SEO relates to issues like backlinks from other sites. The more relevant, high authority sites that you can get to link back to your site, the more Google respects your site. Think of your site as having lots of friends with every link it gets. Some friends are more popular than others and therefore your popularity / trust with Google is enhanced. .
This isn’t the place for a full session on SEO but if you need help managing yours, I do run an SEO consultancy service.
2. Your Product Pages Aren’t Converting Visitors
Are Your Product Descriptions Detailed Enough?
In most cases, thin product descriptions kill conversions. Customers need to be convinced, as well as informed. If you have a product page with no descriptive text about the product, not only will customers have no confidence, search engines will not be able to understand the context of the page.
Weak description: “High-quality cotton t-shirt. Available in multiple colours.”
Effective description: Includes materials information, fit details, care instructions, sizing guidance, lifestyle context etc.
Your descriptions should answer every question a customer might have before they need to ask. Include dimensions, weight, use cases, and benefits – not just features.
Additional tip: Ensure size dimensions are included if it’s important. Furniture for example has to have size information, otherwise a customer won’t purchase. Clothing sites should have branded size guides at a bare minimum if you can’t measure everything individually.
Image Quality and Quantity
Multiple high-resolution images from different angles, lifestyle shots showing products in use, and zoom functionality are non-negotiable. Video content can increase conversions by 80%+.
After working in a busy fashion ecommerce brand for years, I was lucky enough to see the inner workings of the photography process. Read my tips on Mastering Photography for Ecommerce.
3. Your Site Search Is Letting You Down
If customers can’t find products, they can’t buy them. Shopify’s default search is very basic. I can’t stress that enough. If you insist on using the Search & Discovery tool on your Shopify site, make sure you utilise its additional features. However you would be best placed to find a better filtering app, some of which have far superior features.
Search Synonyms and Intelligence
Does your search understand that “trainers” and “sneakers” are the same thing? What about “sofa” vs “couch”? Without synonym mapping, you’re losing sales. Learn more about how to improve your conversion rates by implementing search synonyms.
Search Redirects
If someone searches for a specific brand or discontinued product, where do they land? Strategic search redirects can guide customers to alternatives or category pages.
Note: Shopify Search & Discovery does not offer this ability at the time of writing. You would need a more advanced Search app.
Consider Enhanced Search Solutions
Apps like Boost AI Search transform your store’s search into an intelligent tool that:
- Understands natural language queries
- Learns from customer behaviour
- Provides instant, relevant results
- Includes smart filtering
4. Your Filtering and Navigation Are Frustrating Customers
If you run a site which runs hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of products, your filter options have to be bulletproof.
Filter Configuration Issues
Poor filtering creates friction. Customers should be able to narrow down products by relevant attributes – size, colour, price range, material, etc. They should enable the customer to trim down the potential results within a couple of clicks, enabling them to have a more curated selection with which to browse. Without this, customers will waste time searching through pages and pages of inaccurate products for them, ultimately getting frustrated and leaving the site.
Critical bug to watch for: The Shopify Search & Discovery app has a known glitch where out-of-stock variant options (like specific sizes) still appear when filtering. This creates a frustrating experience – customers think a product is available in their size, click through, and find it’s not.
Filters Improvements Directly Correlate To Improved Conversion Rates
Every improvement to your filtering is a direct investment in your conversion rate. The faster customers can find exactly what they want, the more likely they are to purchase.
Consider these types of options:
- Colour swatches instead of text
- Price range sliders
- Multi-select options (filter by multiple colours at once)
- Visible count of products per filter option
5. Your Traffic Sources Aren’t Great
You might have traffic, but is it the right traffic? Ad-spend has to be targeted to the right people. Newsletters should similarly be aimed at people interested in the subject matter.
Review Your Marketing Channels
- Check Google Analytics:
- What’s your bounce rate by traffic source?
- Which channels have the highest / lowest conversion rates? (could indicate a problem with the page)
- What pages have the highest exit / bounce rates (indicates people aren’t finding what they want)
- What’s the average time on page like for your highest viewed pages?
- Are you targeting the right keywords in paid campaigns?
- Are you running Performance Max ads with too-low budget / too wide a net
- Do your Google Ads campaigns include customer lists to improve your targeting?
- Sometimes the problem isn’t your store, it’s that you’re attracting window shoppers instead of buyers
- Hopefully if you are email marketing, you are using your own newsletter data and not lists that you’ve acquired
6. Pricing and Trust Issues
Competitive Pricing
Have you checked competitor pricing recently? Tools like the Pricing tool in Google Merchant Centre can help you see how much the difference is between your product and your competitors selling the same item.
Trust Signals Are Missing
- Customer reviews and ratings
- Trust badges (secure checkout, money-back guarantee)
- Clear return policy
- Professional email address (not @gmail.com)
- Active social proof
- About page that builds credibility
7. Your Checkout Process Has Friction
Common Checkout Killers
- Unexpected shipping costs (show estimates earlier)
- Forced account creation
- Limited payment options
- Slow page load times
- Mobile checkout issues
- No guest checkout option
- Apps that have been installed and not configured correctly such as up-sell apps / offers at checkout
Here’s a test for you to carry out today: Test your checkout process on mobile and desktop as if you’re a first-time customer. Even better, get someone unfamiliar with the website to test it and watch them. Where do you/they hesitate and why?
Taking Action: Your 30-Day Plan
Week 1: Technical audit
- Google Search Console setup / review
- robots.txt check
- Index status verification in GSC
- Meta title/description audit
Week 2: Content improvements
- Enhance product descriptions
- Improve product photography on pixelated images / non consistent images
- Optimise key landing pages
Week 3: Search and navigation
- Audit site search functionality
- Fix filtering issues
- Implement search redirects
- Consider search upgrade
Week 4: Conversion optimisation
- Add trust signals
- Review checkout process
- Implement abandoned cart recovery
- Test on mobile devices
To Summarise
Most Shopify stores that aren’t making sales have fixable problems in one or more of these areas. The key is to undergo a systematic diagnosis rather than random changes.
Start with the technical foundation. If Google can’t find you, nothing else matters. Then move to conversion optimisation, improving the experience for visitors who do find you.
I am by no means saying this is an extensive list of things that could be causing your issues. There are so many other factors in play but these are the things I’d check first in your position.
If you’re overwhelmed or need expert analysis of your specific store, that’s exactly what I help ecommerce businesses with. Contact me and let me know what issues you have and I’ll be happy to take a look and see how I can help.
Next Steps:
- Read through my Common Mistakes Shopify Store Owners Make article for more hints
- With Black Friday around the corner, read my Shopify Black Friday Content Audit
- Learn why your conversion rate is so bad and how to fix it
