Why Your Shopee or Lazada Store Is Getting Clicks But No Sales

By Kelly Hezemans, founder of iBoost Online

I audited a store last month. The brand had been live for eight months. Good product, decent traffic, almost no sales.

We opened the dashboard together. Within twenty minutes we had found three things. The main image was beautiful on desktop and unreadable on mobile. The product title started with the brand name, which nobody searches for. And free shipping was enabled on every product, adding 5% extra commission per order without the founder knowing.

Eight months of lost revenue. Three fixes that took two days.

This is what I find in almost every store I audit. The problems are specific, identifiable, and almost always fixable quickly. The issue is that nobody showed these founders what to look for.

Here are the fifteen mistakes I see most often.

The Listing Mistakes That Cost the Most

Your title starts with your brand name. Thai buyers do not search for your brand. They search for what your product does. Go to the Shopee or Lazada search bar, type your product category in Thai, and look at the auto-suggest results. Those are the exact phrases buyers use. Put them at the front of your title.

Your main image does not stop the scroll. On mobile, buyers decide whether to click in under two seconds. Test your main image at thumbnail size on your phone next to your top two competitors. If it does not stand out, it needs work before anything else.

Your image gallery answers no buyer questions. Buyers cannot touch or try your product. Your gallery needs to show the product clearly, communicate key benefits, demonstrate scale and ingredients, show the product in use, and include social proof. Six images minimum. Eight is better.

Your description leaves key questions unanswered. Read your last ten customer chat messages. Every question a buyer asked you directly is a gap in your description. Move those answers into the listing.

Fewer than ten reviews or below 4.5 average. The algorithm weights review count and score in its ranking decisions. Getting to ten reviews with a score above 4.5 should be treated as a primary objective for any new listing.

Your price is above the category range without a visible reason. Check the top ten results for your main keyword. If you are significantly above that range, the reason needs to be unmistakably clear in your images and description.

The Promotion Mistakes That Erode Margin

Free shipping is not free. It adds approximately 5% extra commission per order on Shopee. Calculate whether your margin can absorb it before enabling it on every product.

You are joining every promotion the platform recommends. Every voucher, cashback and flash sale comes from your margin, not the platform’s. Join three deliberately chosen promotions per month. Pause everything else.

You are not measuring real profit per order during promotions. Order volume going up during a promotion is not evidence the promotion worked. Export your payout data and calculate real margin per order after all fees and discount costs. That is the only accurate measure.

No strategy for increasing average order value. A tiered voucher with a minimum spend set 10% above your current average order value pushes buyers to add one more item. Most brands never use this.

The Advertising Mistakes That Waste Budget

Running ads on listings with no reviews. A product with no review history has a low quality score. High cost per click, low conversion, low ad frequency. Build ten reviews and a conversion rate above 2% before spending on ads.

Running automated campaigns across every product. Concentrate your budget on the two or three products with the strongest conversion rate and review score. Pause anything with a ROAS below 3. Increase budget on anything above 5.

The Data Mistakes That Allow Everything to Compound

Nobody reviews the store data monthly. Set aside one hour at the end of each month. Check conversion rate by product, ROAS by campaign, margin per order, review score trend. Make two changes. Document them. Measure next month.

Optimising for revenue instead of margin. Revenue going up while margin goes down is not growth. It is working harder for less. Every decision should be evaluated against its impact on real margin per order.

An unresolved incubation period problem. If your store launched with low shipping scores, slow chat response and weak conversion in the first 90 days, the algorithm may have permanently deprioritised you. Recovery is possible but requires sustained improvement across all tracked metrics over several months.

What to Do Next

Most of these are fixable. The majority take less than a week to address.

The question is knowing which ones are affecting your store most and in what order to fix them. That is what a proper data review tells you — opening your real dashboards together and identifying exactly where the revenue is being lost.

Kelly Hezemans is the founder of iBoost Online, an ecommerce growth consultancy for sustainable fashion and lifestyle brands in Southeast Asia. Based in Phuket, Thailand, Kelly works with brands in Singapore and Thailand on Shopify, Shopee and Lazada growth.

Learn more at iboostonline.com