Your Shopify store is getting traffic. The ads are running, the SEO is ticking along, people are landing on your pages. But they’re not buying. The average ecommerce conversion rate sits around 2-3%, which means 97 out of every 100 visitors leave without spending a cent.
Most store owners look at that number and assume the product is the problem. In our experience, it almost never is. The product is fine. The site experience is what’s broken.
We’ve optimised dozens of Shopify stores over the past few years, and the same five problems keep coming up. They’re not complicated to fix. But they are easy to miss if you’ve been staring at your own store every day. Here’s what to look for and what to change.
1. Your Above-the-Fold Messaging Is Weak
You get about three seconds. That’s how long a visitor takes to decide whether your store is worth their time or whether they’re hitting the back button. Most Shopify stores waste those seconds with taglines like “Welcome to our store” or “Quality products for everyone.” Neither of those tells anyone anything.
What to do instead:
- Lead with a value proposition that answers one question: “Why should I buy from you and not someone else?”
- Name a specific benefit or outcome. Not a feature. Not a material. A result the customer cares about.
- Make your primary CTA visible without scrolling. On both desktop and mobile.
A strong above-the-fold section communicates what you sell, why it’s different, and what to do next. If someone has to scroll to figure out any of those three things, you’ve lost them.
2. Product Pages Have No Social Proof
Shoppers are sceptical by default. They want to hear from other customers before they commit, and they want to hear from them early in the browsing process. Not after they’ve scrolled past four paragraphs of product description.
Too many Shopify stores bury reviews at the bottom of the page. Or they have no reviews at all.
What to do instead:
- Put star ratings right below the product title, visible the moment the page loads
- Show the total review count. Even “12 reviews” builds confidence compared to nothing.
- Feature 2-3 photo reviews with real customer images near the top of the review section
- Add trust badges (secure checkout, money-back guarantee) near the Add to Cart button
Social proof is the single most influential factor in online purchase decisions. A product page with 5+ reviews is 270% more likely to convert than one with zero, according to the Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a different business.
3. Your Checkout Has Too Much Friction
Every extra step in checkout loses you roughly 10% of the customers who made it that far. If your checkout forces account creation, reveals surprise shipping costs, or asks for information you don’t need, you’re bleeding revenue at the worst possible moment. These are people who wanted to buy.
What to do instead:
- Enable guest checkout. Always. No exceptions.
- Show shipping costs on the product page, not at checkout. Surprise costs are the number one abandonment reason.
- Cut form fields to the bare minimum. If you’re asking for a company name and you’re not selling B2B, remove it.
- Turn on express payment (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay). Shop Pay alone delivers 91% higher mobile conversion.
- Display security badges and money-back guarantees near the payment form
We wrote a deeper breakdown of checkout fixes with specific data behind each change if you want to go further on this one.
4. Site Speed Is Killing Your Mobile Experience
Over 70% of Shopify traffic is mobile. If your store takes more than three seconds to load on a phone, you’re losing the majority of potential customers before they see a single product. They never make it past the loading screen.
Google’s own research shows that bounce rate increases by 32% when load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds. At 5 seconds, you’ve lost more than half your visitors.
What to do instead:
- Compress all images to WebP format (25-34% smaller files with the same visual quality)
- Remove apps you’re not using. Every installed app can inject scripts that slow your pages down.
- Switch to a lightweight, performance-focused theme if you’re on something bloated
- Lazy load images below the fold
- Run your store through Google PageSpeed Insights. Aim for a score above 70. If you’re below 50, speed is hurting you more than any marketing issue.
5. You Have No Exit-Intent Strategy
Most visitors who leave your site are gone for good. They’re not bookmarking you. They’re not coming back next week. Without a way to capture their attention or information on the way out, every departing visitor is wasted traffic.
What to do instead:
- Add an exit-intent popup with a specific offer. A discount, free shipping, or a useful piece of content (a buying guide, a sizing chart, something relevant to what they were browsing).
- Keep the popup simple. One email field, one CTA. That’s it.
- Test different offers against each other to find what your audience responds to
- Set up an abandoned cart email sequence. Three emails over 72 hours. First email within an hour of abandonment, no discount yet. Save the incentive for email two or three.
What to Do With All of This
Conversion work isn’t about rebuilding your store from scratch. It’s about finding the specific friction points that stop visitors from buying and removing them one at a time. Measure before you change anything, measure after, and move to the next one.
Start with the five areas above. Most stores we audit have at least three of these problems, and fixing them doesn’t require a developer or a big budget. It requires attention and a willingness to test.
The average Affilino client sees a 93% increase in conversions. That’s not a promise. It’s a measured average across real projects with real data. If you want to know where your store is losing money, book a free strategy call.