What to do when nobody is buying

Two hundred and eleven people opened the shop last month. Nobody bought anything. You've changed the photos twice, dropped the price of the best seller by £2, and posted every other day, and the number at the bottom of the page is still zero.

Before you change anything else: count your messages, not your visits.

Five people asking "how much?" and none of them buying is a completely different problem from two hundred visits and not one message. The first is a closing problem. The second is a page problem. They have opposite fixes, and doing the wrong one is how people spend six weeks rebuilding a shop that was fine.

What follows is a diagnostic in order, cheapest to check first. Do them in order. Most shops stop at step two or three.

First, work out whether you have a problem or a sample

If fewer than about 200 people have seen the shop, you do not have a conversion problem. You have almost no data, and every conclusion you draw from it will be wrong.

Two hundred is not a magic number and nobody can give you one that is. It's a rough point at which zero sales starts to mean something rather than nothing. Below it, a run of no sales is entirely ordinary, in the same way that flipping four tails in a row is ordinary. Above it, silence is information.

So the first question is not "why isn't it converting". It's "how many people have actually seen this?" If the honest answer is forty, close this article and go and ask forty people directly, because that's what getting your first ten orders is for and no amount of page-tweaking substitutes for it.

If it's genuinely a few hundred and still nothing, carry on.

Check one: open your own shop the way a stranger does

Not on your laptop. Not logged in. On your phone, in a private browsing window, with wifi off and mobile data on.

This is the check people skip and it's the one that finds the broken thing. What you're looking for:

• Does the link actually work? Paste the exact link from your bio, not one you typed from memory.
• How long does the first photo take to appear on mobile data? If it's more than three or four seconds, your photos are too big, and most people won't wait.
• Can you see a price without scrolling?
• Can you complete an order, all the way, with your thumb, in under a minute?

Do that last one properly. Place a real order on your own shop. People discover the strangest things this way: a delivery option that doesn't exist any more, a variant with no price, a payment instruction that still has last year's account number in it.

If the page crawls on mobile data, that alone can be the whole answer. Resize your photos to about 1200px on the long edge and re-upload them. A 4MB photo straight off a phone camera is roughly ten times bigger than it needs to be.

Check two: can a stranger tell what you sell in four seconds

Show the page to someone who has no idea what you do. A neighbour, a cousin, anyone. Give them four seconds, take the phone away, and ask two questions:

1. What do they sell?
2. Roughly how much?

If they can't answer both, you found it. This happens constantly with shops whose top item is a beautiful close-up crop of a texture, or whose first product is the interesting one rather than the obvious one.

The related failure: your shop name and your bio explain your values instead of your products. "Slow-made, small-batch, ethically sourced" tells a stranger nothing about what's in the box. "Screen-printed tea towels, £12, posted from Leeds" tells them everything.

Check three: is the price actually on the page

"DM for price" costs you most of your buyers and you will never see them, because leaving is silent.

Some sellers hide prices deliberately, usually because the product is bespoke or because they're worried about competitors. For bespoke work, put a starting price: "commissions from £180". For everything else, put the number on. A buyer who has to ask has to decide twice, once to want it and once to open a conversation with a stranger, and the second decision loses far more people than the first.

Same for delivery. A price of £12 and an unknown postage cost is not a price. It's an estimate with a threat attached, and buyers who have been stung before assume the worst.

Check four: are people getting stuck at payment

Now you're into the group that wanted it.

Signs you have a payment problem rather than a page problem: people message to ask "can I pay by card?", people say "I'll send it later" and don't, people ask if you take a specific method and go quiet when you say no.

Go and look at what your buyers actually use. In the UK a bank transfer is normal between people who know each other and slightly odd to a stranger, so a stranger who has to transfer to a personal account will often just leave. In Lagos a transfer is completely normal. In Manila a stranger expects cash on delivery. In Nairobi they expect to pay a till number and see the registered business name before they confirm.

Nobody is going to change their habits to buy a £12 tea towel from someone they've never heard of. You change to meet them, or you accept the loss.

Be careful here, though. Payment is the most expensive place to look for the answer and the least likely place to find it. If nobody is messaging you at all, payment isn't your problem, and adding card payments will not create demand that wasn't there. It's step four for a reason.

Check five: is the traffic the wrong traffic

Two hundred visits from people who will never buy is worth less than eleven from people who might.

The usual sources of wrong traffic:

• A post that went slightly viral for the wrong reason. Funny caption, great video, people who came for the video. They are not buyers and their behaviour will make your numbers look terrible for a month.
• Engagement pods and follow-for-follow. Those people are sellers, not buyers.
• The wrong country. If you post to Kenya but only deliver in the UK, every one of those visits is a loss.
• A giveaway. Giveaways bring people who want free things. Some convert. Most don't.

The tell is the shape rather than the number: a spike of visits with no messages and no saves is almost always the wrong audience. A slow trickle with three questions a week is the right one, and it's the one worth optimising.

Check six: does anybody actually want the thing

This is the last check because it's the most expensive to act on and because people jump to it first out of anxiety.

The honest version of this question is not "is my product good". It's "is there a moment in someone's week when they need this and think of buying it?" Plenty of well-made things have no such moment. A beautiful ceramic spoon rest is well made and nobody wakes up needing one.

Ways to find out cheaply, before you make more stock:

• Offer it to twenty warm contacts individually at full price. If none of them buys, it isn't a marketing problem.
• Take pre-orders for the next batch. Money in advance is the only real signal.
• Ask three people who almost bought what stopped them, and shut up while they answer.

Testing a product before you make it covers doing that properly rather than by vibes.

What Rachel found in Leeds

Rachel screen-prints tea towels and A3 prints in a spare room in Leeds. Tea towels are £12, prints £22, postage £3.95, and she'd had the shop up for seven weeks with 340 visits and two orders, both from friends.

She was about to drop everything to £9 and start running ads. Instead she worked the list.

Check one found the first thing. Her shop link in her bio had a trailing character in it from when she'd pasted it. It loaded for her, because her browser had the correct URL cached. On a fresh phone it 404'd. She had no way of knowing how many of those 340 visits were people who'd already failed, but some of them were, and the fix took ninety seconds.

Check two found the second. Her first product was an abstract print, because it was her favourite. Four people out of five shown the page for four seconds said "art?" and none guessed tea towels. She reordered the shop to put the tea towels first, because that's what people actually bought when they bought anything.

Check three found the third and worst. Her postage was £3.95, which is fine, but it appeared at the very end. On a £12 tea towel that's a 33% jump at the last screen. She changed the listing to say "£12, £3.95 postage, or free over £30" and added a two-towel bundle at £22.

Over the next four weeks: 290 visits, nine orders, £214. Average order value went from £12 to £23.70, because the free-postage line at £30 pushed people to two items and a print.

None of that was a marketing fix. It was a broken link, a wrong first product, and a hidden cost, and it took her one evening.

The number she watched afterwards wasn't visits. It was questions per week, because a question is a person who got far enough to want something, and going from zero questions to four is a much clearer signal than traffic ever is.

The silence isn't a signal, so go and ask

People who don't buy don't tell you why. They just leave, and the absence of complaints reads like the absence of problems. It isn't.

The cheapest research you will ever do is messaging five people who engaged and didn't buy:

Hey, saw you'd saved the tea towel post a while back. I'm trying to work out what's putting people off, would you mind telling me straight? Genuinely won't be offended.

Some won't reply. The ones who do will tell you something you couldn't have guessed. Common answers, all of which are fixable and none of which you'd find by staring at your shop: didn't realise you posted outside the city, thought it was more expensive, wasn't sure it was still going because the last post was from March, wanted a different colour, was waiting for payday.

That last one is worth sitting with. "Waiting for payday" isn't a rejection, it's a date. Ask if you can message them on the 28th.

If people are getting all the way to the last screen and stopping there, that's a narrower and better-documented problem, and finding out why people abandon goes into it properly.

What not to do while you're panicking

Don't drop the price first. A price drop is the most expensive experiment available and the least informative. If nobody bought at £12, almost nobody buys at £9, and now you've told your existing customers the £12 was made up. If you're going to discount, do it as a deliberate, time-boxed thing with the margins worked out, and running a discount without losing money has the arithmetic.

Don't rebuild the shop. Rebuilding feels like progress and produces no information. The version you have is not the reason, unless check one said it was.

Don't start running ads. Paying to send more people to a page that converts nobody just costs money faster. Fix the page, get the first handful of organic sales, then decide. When to spend money on ads is mostly a list of things to do instead.

Don't add more products. Twenty listings do not sell better than five. They sell worse, because a stranger arriving at twenty things has to make a decision instead of a purchase.

One honest thing about the tools

You will read, on a lot of sites including tool vendors', that the fix for no sales is a proper checkout with card payments. Sometimes it is. Usually it isn't, and it's worth knowing what that fix actually costs before you reach for it.

On Sailo, card payments carry 1–3% of the goods on each card order, taken as a Stripe application fee on top of whatever Stripe charges you. If you're doing nine orders a month at £23.70, that subscription is the expensive part by a long way, and it will not fix a broken link or a hidden postage cost.

There's no mobile money rail either. If your buyers pay by M-Pesa or GCash, that stays where it always was: in your own account, confirmed by you, from your own notifications. Sailo carries the catalogue and the order. Your bank still tells you about the money.

None of that is a reason not to use it. It is a reason not to expect a subscription to be the answer to this particular question.

Do check one tonight

Get your phone. Turn wifi off. Open a private window. Paste your shop link exactly as it appears in your bio, and try to buy something from yourself.

Write down every place you hesitate. Fix those before you touch anything else, and then count questions per week rather than visits for the next month. If questions go up and orders don't, you have a closing problem and the answer is in how you reply. If questions stay at zero, you have a demand problem and no page will fix it.