Traffic without sales is one of the most frustrating problems a marketplace seller can face. You can see the visitors coming in. You can see people clicking on your products. But the orders are not following.
In most cases, the problem is not the product. It is one or more of the fifteen mistakes below. These are the issues that come up repeatedly in every store audit I do, across every category, for brands that have been selling for three months and brands that have been selling for three years.
Work through this list and be honest about which ones apply to your store.
The Shopee and Lazada algorithms rank products based on keyword relevance. If your product title does not contain the words Thai buyers type into the search bar, your product will not appear in their results, regardless of how good it is.
This is not about stuffing keywords into a title. It is about understanding how Thai buyers describe your product category and making sure those words appear in the first 50 characters of your title, where the algorithm weights them most heavily.
Fix: Go to the Shopee or Lazada search bar, type your main product name in Thai, and look at the auto-suggest dropdown. Those are the exact phrases buyers are using. Make sure the most relevant ones are in your title.
If your product titles and descriptions are in English only, you are invisible to Thai language searches. This is one of the most common mistakes foreign brands make when entering the Thai marketplace.
Thai buyers search in Thai. The platform algorithm indexes in Thai. English-only listings simply do not appear in the majority of search results on Shopee Thailand or Lazada Thailand.
Fix: Translate and localise all product titles and key bullet points into Thai. This is not a direct translation exercise. Use the keyword research from Mistake 1 to make sure the Thai titles are optimised for actual search behaviour, not just accurate translations of your English copy.
On mobile, buyers make a decision about whether to click on your product in under two seconds based on the main image alone. If your main image does not stand out against the white background of the search results page, buyers will scroll past without clicking.
A low click-through rate means the algorithm shows your product less frequently over time, which compounds the problem.
Fix: Check your main image on your mobile phone against your top two competitors in the search results. Does it stand out or blend in? A clean white background, clear product shot, and readable text overlay if needed. If your image looks similar to everything around it, it needs work. For a deeper look at what makes a product image perform, the principles in our guide on maximising marketplace visibility apply directly to image optimisation.
Most sellers upload their main product shot and stop there. But buyers on Shopee and Lazada cannot touch, smell, or try your product. Your image gallery is the only way to answer the questions they would ask in a physical store.
If your gallery does not show size or scale, texture, key ingredients or materials, how to use the product, and what makes it different from cheaper alternatives, buyers will leave without buying because their questions were not answered.
Fix: Structure your image gallery with a purpose for each slot. Image 1 is the click magnet. Image 2 shows your key benefits with text overlay. Image 3 shows scale or texture. Image 4 shows proof such as certifications or reviews. Image 5 shows the product in use or in a lifestyle context.
Some buyers click, like what they see, and buy. Others need to verify facts before they commit. If your product description does not include full ingredient or material lists, storage instructions, shelf life, skin type compatibility, or sizing information, you are losing the logical buyer who would have purchased if their specific question had been answered.
Fix: Read your last ten customer chat messages before purchase. Every question a buyer asked you directly is a question your description failed to answer. Move those answers into the top eight bullet points of your description.
The platform algorithm uses review score and review count as ranking signals. Buyers use them as trust signals. A product with fewer than ten reviews or an average below 4.5 will underperform against comparable products with stronger social proof, regardless of product quality.
Fix: Systematically follow up with buyers after every purchase using the platform's built-in review request tools. Respond to every review, positive and negative. A professional response to a negative review often converts hesitant buyers more effectively than another five-star review.
Price is not everything on Shopee and Lazada, but it is a significant factor in the add-to-cart decision. If your price is more than 15 to 20% above comparable products in your category without a clear and visible reason, many buyers will choose a competitor.
Fix: Search for your main product keywords and look at the price range of the top ten results. If your price sits significantly above that range, either adjust the price, add more perceived value through bundling or a free gift, or make the reason for the premium price unmistakably clear in your images and description.
Buyers on Shopee and Lazada in Thailand have been conditioned to expect free or very low-cost shipping. A high shipping cost displayed at checkout is one of the most common reasons for abandoned carts on both platforms.
Fix: Enable free shipping for your best-selling products if your margin can support it. If it cannot, check your real cost including the additional commission that free shipping adds. For a full breakdown of what free shipping actually costs you, read Shopee and Lazada fees explained before you make any changes to your shipping settings.
The Shopee and Lazada ad algorithms rank ads partly based on expected click-through rate and conversion rate. A product with no reviews and weak conversion history will have a low quality score, which means you pay more per click and appear less frequently than competitors with stronger product history.
Fix: Before spending on ads, make sure the product you are promoting has at least five reviews and a conversion rate above 2%. Advertising a product with no social proof is expensive and ineffective. Build the organic foundation first, then amplify with paid spend.
Automated campaigns on Shopee and Lazada advertise all your products at once, with the platform deciding which ones to show. This sounds efficient but often means budget is spread across products that have no realistic chance of converting, diluting the spend that should be concentrated on your proven performers.
Fix: Switch from automated to manual or specific product campaigns. Choose your two or three best-performing products by conversion rate and review score and put your budget behind those. Your products are your betting horses. Back the ones that are already winning.
The platforms are excellent at persuading sellers to join every recommended promotion. Flash sales, category events, cashback campaigns, voucher programs. Joining all of them feels like good marketing. In practice it often means selling your best products at your lowest price to buyers who would have bought anyway, while eroding the margin that funds your growth.
Fix: Choose three promotions per month deliberately. Before joining any campaign, calculate your margin at the required discount level. If the margin does not work, do not join. For a full breakdown of how to think about ecommerce growth strategy rather than just promotional volume, read why most brands cannot scale their ecommerce store.
Most sellers look at order volume during a promotion and assume it worked. Very few look at the actual margin per order after all platform fees, voucher costs, and additional commissions are deducted.
Fix: After every promotion, export the sales data and calculate real margin per order for the promotional period. Compare it to your baseline margin outside promotions. If the promotion generated volume but reduced your overall profitability, it was not a success regardless of how many orders came in. Our guide on how to use your Shopee, Lazada, and GA4 data shows exactly how to do this calculation.
Most sellers focus entirely on getting more orders. Very few focus on getting more revenue from each order they already have. Increasing average order value is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to grow revenue because it requires no additional traffic.
Fix: Set up tiered vouchers with a minimum spend threshold set at approximately 10% above your current average order value. This pushes buyers to add one more item to qualify for the discount. Set up combo deals pairing your best-selling product with a complementary slower-moving item. Both tactics increase revenue per order without increasing your customer acquisition cost.
A store that nobody is actively monitoring will plateau. Traffic patterns change, ad efficiency declines, competitor listings improve, and platform algorithms update. Without a monthly data review, these changes go unnoticed until the impact on revenue is already significant.
Fix: Set aside one hour at the end of each month to review your conversion rate, ROAS by campaign, margin per order by product, and review score trend. Make one or two changes based on what you find. Write them down and check the impact the following month. If you need senior ecommerce expertise to help you run these reviews, read about what a fractional ecommerce manager actually does and whether that model fits your brand.
This is the mistake that underlies many of the others. Revenue is visible and easy to measure. Profit requires calculation. Most sellers optimise for the number they can see most easily, which is revenue, and ignore the number that actually determines whether their business is sustainable, which is profit.
A store with growing revenue and shrinking margin is not growing. It is working harder for less. Every decision about promotions, ad spend, vouchers, and free shipping should be evaluated against its impact on real margin per order, not on order volume or revenue alone.
Fix: Calculate your real margin per order for your top ten products right now, using actual payout figures from your Seller Centre and your cost of goods. The result will tell you which products are genuinely profitable and which ones are generating volume at the expense of margin. That knowledge changes every other decision you make.
Most conversion problems on Shopee and Lazada are fixable. Bad products or bad markets do not cause them. Specific, identifiable issues in product content, pricing strategy, promotion management, or data review cause them.
The brands that grow consistently are not the ones that spend the most on ads or join the most promotions. They are the ones who identify what is actually stopping buyers from converting and fix it systematically.
If you want an expert to go through your store and identify exactly which of these fifteen mistakes are costing you revenue, iBoost Online offers ecommerce store audits that do exactly this, with your own data, on your own dashboard, so you understand every finding and can act on it immediately.