5 reasons your online store isn’t making sales

An aerospace engineer selling olive oil, an artist who started with 70 Instagram followers, and three skaters in Mexico City all launched online stores and hit the same wall: getting people to buy.

Sometimes the fix was in how they talked about the product. Sometimes it was who they were trying to reach, or how the buying process actually worked.

Here’s what they and two other store owners figured out about what stood between them and consistent sales.

1. Your product isn’t meaningful enough

Elise Hernaez-Iweins sells natural beauty and wellness products made from bee-derived ingredients: honey, royal jelly, propolis, beeswax. She launched with 30 products in 2011, and today the range has grown to 170.

It’s a competitive market, so what made Secrets de Miel grow the way it did?

Elise is a fifth-generation beekeeper and her entire brand is built around that legacy. She chose a direct-selling model with over 3,000 independent ambassadors rather than placing products on supermarket shelves.

The ambassadors introduce products through workshops, personal recommendations, and social media, earning from their own sales. That personal connection is part of what Elise is selling.

If someone can find what you sell on Amazon for less money and faster shipping, they will. So the question every store owner needs to answer is: why would someone buy this from you?

Before writing a single product description, ask yourself what your product replaces in your customer’s life, what they want to say by owning it, and what they feel when they buy it.

For Elise, the answer was a story about family, craft, and women building something independently.

That’s what makes someone choose her brand over a generic honey face cream. It’s purpose that should guide your messaging and your product pages.

From family beehives to 3,000 people selling her products without a single retail shelf.

Read Elise’s full story

2. Your store doesn’t give people a reason to stay

Getting people to your site is one thing. Giving them a reason to spend time there is another.

Most store owners think about discoverability as an SEO problem, and that definitely matters, but for a small store competing against established brands, the more useful question is: why would someone stay on your site?

Prem Pithwa, the founder of OliveAura, asked himself that before he even launched. He’s an aerospace engineer who sources extra virgin olive oil from small family farms in the Northern Peloponnese region of Greece. 

His first harvest produced 750 tins across three label types. He could have put up a shop page with a few product photos and called it done. Instead, he spent most of his two-month pre-launch period researching and writing content.

So he filled the site with explanations of olive oil production, what “extra virgin” actually means, how his sourcing works, and what to look for when buying quality oil.

He wanted people to understand what they were buying rather than trying to sell with marketing buzzwords.

For a new store, each piece of useful content is another potential entry point for customers. Blog posts, sourcing stories, how-to content, anything that answers the kinds of questions your audience is already asking before they buy.

An aerospace engineer who figured the best way to sell 750 tins of olive oil was education rather than marketing.

Read Prem’s full story

3. You don’t know who you’re selling to

Someone who buys from an independent store over a chain is doing it for a reason, like the quality, the values, or the person behind it.

Your job is to make that reason clear. But you can’t do that well unless you know who you’re talking to.

Suburbios Skate in Mexico City is proof of how powerful that focus can be. Ángel, Luis, and Mario didn’t try to compete with the big skate brands already serving wealthy neighborhoods.

They built specifically for communities on the outskirts of the city where access to quality gear was limited.

That focus shaped everything: the products they stock, the price points they set, the free skateboarding lessons they offer with every board purchase, and the contests they run with local artists.

They started in 2020 and now have two physical stores with online sales up 121% year over year. That growth came from going deeper into one community rather than trying to reach everyone.

Three skaters in Mexico City who grew online sales 121% by building for one community instead of trying to reach everyone.

Read their full story

4. Buying from you is too complicated

When a wholesale buyer disappeared on him mid-season, Nando Durá, a citrus farmer in Valencia, Spain, decided to sell his oranges directly to consumers.

He posted on X that he’d start shipping oranges himself the following Monday, and sold around 250 boxes of 15 kg in the first week alone.

But his first “store” was WhatsApp. Customers would message him, he’d reply with what was available, they’d agree on an order, and then he’d wait for proof of payment.

He ran an entire season that way. Every single sale required a back-and-forth conversation, often during evenings, weekends, and mealtimes. It worked, but it drained him, and it couldn’t grow.

The product can be right, the audience can be right, and people can genuinely want to buy, but if the process of placing an order is confusing or slow, you’re capping how far you can grow.

Go through the ordering process on your own store. Count the steps and note every moment where you hesitate or have to think about what to do next. If you get stuck, your customers will too.

When Nando built Naranjas Nando Durá, 70% of orders moved to the website. Customers could browse, pick a box size, and pay without needing to talk to anyone.

He said it took a significant weight off his shoulders, especially during the winter months when citrus sales peak. His revenue grew 47% the following year.

From WhatsApp chaos to 70% of orders through his website – a Valencia citrus farmer’s path to direct sales.

Read Nando’s full story

5. You’re relying on social media to do everything

If you’re putting all of your energy into social media and not seeing it translate to sales, the problem might be that you don’t have a way to convert the attention into purchases.

Trinity Shiroma started Arts by Trinity with about 70 Instagram followers. Her first two commissioned clients found her through the platform, and for a while the growth path seemed obvious: post more, get more followers, pick up more sales.

But as orders grew, so did the volume of messages in her inbox. And she could never be sure her posts were actually reaching the people who’d already bought from her. She needed a channel she could control.

So she started using Hostinger Reach to manage separate email lists, including the waitlist to her Architecture Mail Club – a monthly subscription where she ships hand-painted postcards, handmade crafts, and architectural stories to members around the world.

The club launched with 117 subscribers in its first month. The next month, that number doubled. Then it doubled again. Email became how she made announcements, managed demand, and kept her audience close.

Within four months of launching her website, Trinity was earning more from art than from her architecture day job. Today she ships nearly 3,000 subscription envelopes a month to customers in 22 countries.

Social media got her found. Email and her own website got her paid, without relying on an algorithm to show them her content.

Four months from her first website sale to quitting her architecture job. And it started with 70 followers.

Read Trinity’s full story

Start with one fix

You don’t need to fix all five at once. Nando started with a post on X and 250 boxes of oranges. Trinity started with a website and a commission form. Elise started with 30 products and a belief that personal connection could beat a supermarket shelf.

Each of them had one thing that wasn’t working, and they fixed that first. Figure out which one sounds most like your store right now, and start there.

And if the thing holding you back is the store itself, you can build an ecommerce site with Hostinger without needing a developer or a big budget.