If the dust has settled on your big eCommerce website launch and you’re still not getting any orders, don’t despair just yet. Volusion, one of the web’s leading integrated eCommerce solutions, has been built to tackle the very problems most people tend to face online.
The following are just a few common reasons why you’re not getting shoppers at your ecommerce store. And you’ll be glad to hear that Volusion deals with every single one of them easily and effectively.
Your Design Is Not Good Enough
Let’s face it, looks matter. If your site doesn’t look professional or enticing to your potential buyers, they’re going to go elsewhere. You need an eCommerce solution that not only offers a robust engine, but also has the exterior to match.
Volusion makes it easy to slap a nice-looking theme on your website at the click of a button. Your package comes bundled with various free themes to choose from – they all look better than most standard themes you get with other eCommerce solutions.
If you really want to go the extra mile, however, it’s worth spending a little bit more to get a customized theme that will really blow your visitors away. You can either tweak an existing theme to give it a unique twist, or you can get one designed from scratch. Don’t underestimate just how much of an influence aesthetics have on users.
SEO Not Up to Scratch
Your site can be a visual marvel and the technical framework robust and reliable, but if you’re not getting plenty of eyeballs you’re not going to get sales, no matter what you do.
That’s where SEO comes in. If you haven’t implemented a search engine strategy, you’re doomed to fail. The problem you’ll often find, however, is that many ecommerce platforms simply do not cater to solid SEO. These companies keep their focus on the nuts and bolts behind the ecommerce platform, but don’t think about marketing.
Volusion doesn’t make this mistake. The company has invested plenty in developing a full SEO toolbox, ready to allow you to tweak your content, titles, Meta information, and everything else that makes your site ready to be loved by the various search engines (Google and Bing included).
Shoppers Don’t Trust You
The web is built on trust. People are very careful these days and are quite guarded about giving out their personal payment details online. And they have every right to be.
The problem is that most websites just don’t exude the trustworthiness they need to. Volusion helps eradicate this problem by being fully PCI (Payment Card Industry) certified, ensuring robust security for your site. In addition, it hooks into a secure payment gateway that offers all of the options that customers are used to, including VISA and Mastercard.
You’re Not Marketing Your Website
People may love your website, but sometimes they just need a little reminder that you exist. Newsletters, discount emails, or updates via social media are solid strategies to get more people through your virtual doors.
Volusion has been built with marketing in mind from the get go. You’ve got email newsletter fully integrated, meaning that there’s no need to sign up to a third-party services. Not only that, you also get easy integration with social media platforms, making it simple to entrench your presence online.
Diagnose the real reason before you blame the platform
Before assuming the store itself is the problem, separate the three things that "no orders" can actually mean, because each has a different fix:
- No traffic. Check analytics: if sessions are near zero, design and trust are not your problem yet — discoverability is. This is an SEO, content, and paid-acquisition problem.
- Traffic but no add-to-carts. People arrive and leave without engaging. That points at relevance (wrong keywords bringing the wrong visitors), product-page quality, pricing, or trust.
- Add-to-carts but no completed orders. The leak is in the cart and checkout: unexpected shipping cost, forced account creation, limited payment options, or a confusing flow.
The platform conversation only matters once you know which of these you have. A new theme will not fix a checkout-abandonment problem, and a faster checkout will not fix a traffic problem.
A practical first-30-days plan for a quiet store
- Instrument it. Confirm analytics and a checkout funnel are tracking. You cannot fix what you cannot see.
- Fix the top traffic blockers. Title tags and meta descriptions on category and best-seller pages, an XML sitemap submitted to Search Console, and clean internal linking. These are the cheapest wins.
- Harden trust. Visible return policy, real contact information, security indicators at checkout, and reviews on product pages.
- Remove checkout friction. Offer guest checkout, show shipping cost before the last step, and support the payment methods your audience expects.
- Drive a controlled traffic test. A small, tightly targeted paid campaign to your best category tells you within days whether the problem is traffic or conversion.
Where Volusion's built-ins help — and where you outgrow them
Volusion's bundled themes, SEO controls (editable titles, meta data, URLs), PCI-compliant checkout, and built-in newsletter and social integrations cover the fundamentals well for a launching store. Where stores typically need help is past the fundamentals: a customized theme that reflects the brand instead of a stock template, advanced shipping logic, and an SEO program that goes beyond filling in meta fields to actually earning rankings. Editorial note: Volusion remains an active hosted eCommerce platform; merchants weighing a long-term platform decision should also evaluate Shopify and BigCommerce for current feature parity, and we help clients make that comparison objectively rather than defaulting to any one platform.
Frequently asked questions
I get traffic but almost no sales — is my store broken? Not necessarily. Pull your add-to-cart rate and checkout-completion rate separately. A healthy store loses some shoppers at every step; the question is where the drop is abnormally steep. If add-to-cart is reasonable but checkout completion is very low, the problem is almost always cost transparency, payment options, or a forced account. If add-to-cart itself is near zero, the problem is upstream — relevance, pricing, product-page quality, or trust.
How long before SEO brings shoppers? Plan on a few months before organic traffic is a meaningful channel for a newer store. That is exactly why the controlled paid test in the plan above matters: it answers the "is anyone interested in this product at this price" question in days rather than waiting a quarter on organic.
Should I switch platforms because I am not getting orders? Rarely. Platform migrations are expensive and risky, and they do not fix traffic or trust problems — you take the same issues to a new URL structure. Exhaust the diagnostic and the 30-day plan first; migrate only when you have a concrete capability the current platform genuinely cannot provide.
What is the single highest-impact fix for a quiet store? For most stores it is removing checkout friction (guest checkout + early shipping cost) combined with basic on-page SEO on category and best-seller pages. Those two together address the most common version of both the "no traffic" and "traffic but no orders" problems.
If your store is live and quiet, the fastest path is usually a focused audit of these exact areas. See our Volusion services and eCommerce SEO, or contact us for a diagnosis of which of the three problems above you actually have.