Your store isn't selling: how to find where the funnel actually breaks

Short answer: "the store isn't selling" is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Until you know how many people reached a product page, how many added to cart and how many abandoned checkout, every decision is guesswork. This topic shows how to break the problem into numbers in a single evening and see exactly where the money leaks.

The five numbers without which the conversation is meaningless

Before changing anything, you need five values for the last 30 days:

1. Sessions — how many people arrived at all
2. Product page views — how many reached an actual product
3. Add to cart — how many pressed "buy"
4. Checkouts started — how many entered the checkout
5. Orders — how many made it to the end

Those give you four transitions, and one of them is usually your problem:

The ballparks are not law: a jewellery store and a consumables store differ by multiples. But a gap inside your own funnel is always visible: one transition will be clearly worse than its neighbours. That is where your money and attention should go.

Turn losses into money — otherwise there is nothing to compare

Abstract percentages don't help you decide. This calculation does:

If 1,000 people a month reach checkout, 350 of them place an order, and the average order value is €80, then each percentage point of checkout conversion is worth €800 a month. Going from 35% to 45% is €9,600 a year.

Run this estimate for all four transitions. After that, "what do we fix first" stops being an argument about taste: you are comparing what something earns against what it costs, not whether it looks nice.

This is also the step where it usually turns out that a €15,000 full redesign addresses a €300/month problem, while rebuilding one checkout step for €1,500 addresses an €800/month one.

Four typical loss profiles

Across years of audits I keep seeing four recurring pictures. Identify yours — it tells you which topics to read first.

Profile 1: people never reach the products. Sessions are there, product views are not. Usually a bad catalogue search, awkward filters, or traffic from the wrong queries. Read search and filters and SEO mistakes.

Profile 2: the product page doesn't convince. People browse products but don't add to cart. Almost always missing information: photos, delivery times, stock, sizing, reviews. Read the product page and trust and objections.

Profile 3: full carts, no orders. The classic: surprise shipping costs, forced registration, an overlong form. This is the most expensive and the fastest-fixed profile — cart and checkout.

Profile 4: everything looks "fine" but there is no money. The funnel is even, conversion is average, and the business doesn't grow. Then the problem isn't conversion, it's economics: one-off purchases, no repeat business, acquisition cost eating the margin. Read retention and LTV.

There is a fifth, hidden profile: the numbers are simply wrong. If your store conversion reads 12%, or analytics shows twice as many orders as the WooCommerce admin, start with analytics — otherwise you'll be fixing a problem that doesn't exist.

Why "we need a redesign" is almost always the wrong diagnosis

A redesign is the most common answer to falling sales and the riskiest one. Because:

• It changes everything at once. If sales go up afterwards, you don't know what worked. If they drop, you don't know what broke.
• It treats aesthetics, not barriers. Nobody abandons a cart because the button is the wrong shade of green. They abandon because the last step added €12 for shipping.
• It is expensive and slow. While a redesign runs, the store gets no improvements at all for two to four months.
• It frequently breaks what worked. SEO especially: changed URLs, lost markup, restructured categories. More on that in ecommerce SEO mistakes.

A redesign is justified when the store genuinely fails its job: an outdated catalogue structure, a mobile experience that can't be salvaged, a brand you're embarrassed to show. But that should be a conclusion drawn from data, not a contractor's opening offer. If someone proposes a redesign before looking at your funnel, they are selling you scope, not a solution.

Developer note: where to get these numbers

In GA4 the funnel is built from the standard ecommerce events — view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase — documented in the GA4 ecommerce reference. Practical caveats:

• Reconcile purchase with the WooCommerce admin. A gap larger than 10–15% almost always means duplicated events or lost orders (payment redirects to a bank are the classic culprit).
• Don't conflate begin_checkout with a cart page view. In WooCommerce these are separate steps, and merging them hides the most interesting gap you have.
• Split mobile and desktop. A blended number masks the fact that mobile is twice as bad — and it usually is.
• Consent Mode breaks statistics asymmetrically. Some events never fire, and it is rarely a random sample. More in the analytics topic.

If the events don't exist at all, that is task number one, not a "someday" item. Proper ecommerce tracking takes one or two days to set up and makes everything else meaningful.

Practical check

• Collected the five numbers for 30 days and calculated the four transitions
• Identified which transition is worse than its neighbours
• Converted each transition into money: what one percentage point is worth
• Reconciled analytics orders against admin orders — gap under 10%
• Looked at the funnel separately for mobile and desktop
• Identified my loss profile from the four above
• Not starting a redesign until all of the above is answered

What's next

Once you know your weak transition, the work moves to that specific stage. Next up: store speed and revenue — the one improvement that acts on all four transitions simultaneously.

If you'd rather not run the numbers yourself, I do this as a standalone engagement: conversion audit and optimisation — funnel breakdown, prioritised hypotheses, and a fixed price for the implementation.