You're paying for traffic. The clicks are coming in. And the sales still aren't where they should be.
Before you increase your ad spend, check your bucket. Because if there are holes in your ecommerce conversion rate — and there almost certainly are — more traffic just means faster leaking. Here are the eight places most stores bleed money, and what to do about each one.
Your site is slower than your customer's patience
Every extra second your page takes to load costs you conversions. Portent puts the drop at over 4% per second — and that's before you factor in what you're paying per click on Google Ads for visitors who bail before the page finishes rendering.
Diagnose it with Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Shopify's built-in speed audit. Fix it by compressing images, removing dead-weight apps, and implementing lazy loading. None of this is glamorous. All of it moves the number.
Your checkout is asking for trust you haven't earned yet
Not every customer wants to put their card details into a gateway they've never heard of. Integrate payment options they recognise — PayFast, Peach Payments, Paystack. Add Buy Now Pay Later through PayJustNow, PayFlex, or HappyPay, and you reduce price sensitivity without cutting your margin.
For high-value items, direct EFTs are worth exploring — transaction fees on 2–5% add up fast. The principle is simple: the more familiar the checkout feels, the less friction at the moment of decision.
Your product page is doing the job of a shrug
Bad product photos and vague descriptions are conversion killers. Your product page is your silent sales team — it works 24 hours a day, and if it's phoning it in, so is your revenue.
Fashion needs front, back, close-up, and fabric detail. Tech needs specs, comparisons, and clear differentiation (IPS vs TN panels matters to the person who's choosing). And your product descriptions pull double duty — they sell and they rank. If you're writing them like an afterthought, you're leaving both money and traffic on the table.
One caveat on AI-generated imagery: use it where quality holds. The moment accuracy suffers — especially on products with intricate detail — you've bought yourself a return rate problem.
You haven't given them a reason to trust you
Online shoppers are cautious by default. Your ecommerce conversion rate lives and dies on how quickly you can flip that switch. Verified reviews with real photos (Yotpo, Trustpilot) close that gap faster than almost anything else. Don't fabricate them — it's detectable, and when it gets found out, the damage is permanent.
Make sure your SSL certificate is active. A missing padlock in the browser is an immediate exit. Secure checkout badges and recognised trust logos cost almost nothing to implement and signal credibility before the customer has to think about it.
Your best-selling product is out of stock
This one sounds obvious. It still kills stores.
A product running at 12% conversion rate going out of stock doesn't just pause those sales — it drags your overall store conversion rate down because the denominator (traffic) keeps moving while the numerator (purchases) stalls. Monitor your top SKUs like they're your most important asset, because they are. Enable back-in-stock notifications. Stop running ads to products with limited availability.
Your shipping isn't meeting expectations that Amazon set
Whether you like it or not, your customers are benchmarking against Takealot and Amazon. That means 1–3 days in urban areas is the expectation, not the exception.
For local delivery options, PUDO lockers give customers affordable self-service pickup. PAXI through PEP opens up informal settlements and townships — a market a lot of ecom brands still underserve. The Courier Guy, Dawn Wing, and Fastway are the reliable workhorses for most South African operations.
Be upfront about costs and timelines. Surprise fees at checkout are one of the top reasons carts get abandoned.
Your checkout has too many steps
Shopify's one-page checkout works. Use it. WooCommerce can work too, but left unoptimised it becomes a friction machine — and every extra click is a reason for a customer to reconsider.
Be careful with third-party redirects. Payment gateway pop-outs create distrust. If you're using redirect-style checkouts, configure your Meta Pixel and Google Ads tracking via CAPI or enhanced conversions — otherwise you're flying blind on attribution.
Fewer clicks. Simpler process. Higher conversion rate. Every time.
Your mobile experience is a desktop site that shrank
Mobile accounts for 80%+ of ecommerce traffic for most stores. If your mobile experience is just your desktop layout scaled down, you're converting a fraction of what you should be.
The failure modes are predictable: buttons too small to tap, elements that overlap, hero images that crop badly on smaller screens. Fix it with a responsive theme — Shopify's Dawn, Impulse, or Prestige all handle this well — and test on actual devices, not just desktop preview. Then prioritise mobile load speed separately. It's a different problem from desktop speed and it needs its own attention.
The bottom line
More traffic isn't the answer if the store is leaking. Fix the conversion rate first — then scale. Every point you add to your ecommerce conversion rate is money that compounds on every campaign you run from that point forward.
The eight problems above aren't edge cases. They're the most common reasons a store that should be converting isn't. Start with the one that costs you the most sleep. Fix it this week. Then move to the next one.