The reflex when sales plateau is to buy more traffic. More Meta Ads, more Google, more email. Except that doubling the traffic of a store converting at 1% is an expensive way to bring in even more people who leave without buying. You pay for traffic twice: once to attract it, and again when it leaks away.
The average e-commerce store converts between 1.5% and 2.5%. In other words, 97 people out of 100 leave empty-handed, usually for reasons you can fix without spending another cent on advertising. Here are the six leaks we find in almost every SMB store audit in Quebec, in the order they do the most damage.
01 Surprise shipping costs
This is the number one cause of cart abandonment. The customer puts a $60 item in the cart, reaches checkout, discovers $14 of shipping plus taxes, and closes the tab. Close to 7 carts out of 10 are abandoned across all sectors, and unexpected costs explain a large share of that. In Quebec the friction is worse: shipping to Saguenay, the Gaspé or the North Shore is expensive and slow. The answer is not always free shipping, it is transparency: show the cost on the product page itself, or offer a clear threshold ("Free shipping over $75"), which often lifts the average order value along the way.
02 The abandoned cart with no follow-up
Someone put a product in the cart then left. They were two clicks from buying. Do nothing and the sale is gone. A follow-up sequence recovers on average 5% to 10% of those carts: on 200 abandonments a month, that is 10 to 20 sales brought back without a cent of advertising. The sequence that works: an email within the hour, a second the next day answering an objection, a third at 48 to 72 hours sometimes carrying a small incentive. SMS works very well here when the customer has given their number. The trap: offering a discount in the very first message trains people to abandon on purpose.
03 Friction at checkout
Too many steps, too many fields, and above all a mandatory account before buying — one of the most expensive frictions in the funnel. The customer wants to pay, not sign up. Offer guest checkout by default and suggest the account after the purchase. Strip the funnel to what is strictly necessary, turn on address autofill, and offer the payment methods people in Quebec actually use: Interac, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, instalments for larger baskets. A customer who cannot find their usual method hesitates, and hesitation kills the sale.
04 Mobile load speed
More than half your traffic arrives on a phone, and that is where it gets hot. Every extra second of load time drags conversion down: a page loading in 1 second converts markedly better than the same page at 4 or 5, and past 3 seconds on mobile you lose a good share of visitors before they even see the product. The usual culprits: uncompressed photos weighing several megabytes, a pile of Shopify apps loading scripts, pop-ups that block the screen. Compress your images, clear out the unused apps, and test on a real phone over cellular data, not just the office wifi.
You pay for traffic twice: once to attract it, and again when it leaks away. Plugging a leak recovers revenue you have already paid for and are leaving on the table.
05 Weak product pages
Online, the customer cannot touch, try on or ask a question: your product page has to do the work of a good salesperson. Three things are almost always missing: plenty of sharp photos (several angles, in context, with a sense of scale), clear benefits rather than a dry list of specifications, and proof sitting right beside the buy button. "5000 mAh battery" does not sell; "two days without charging" sells. Answer objections on the page: materials, care, warranty, returns, real delivery times. In Quebec, a properly bilingual product page matters: sloppy copy or a dubious machine translation casts doubt on the whole store.
06 Missing social proof
Nobody wants to be the first to buy from a stranger. Customer reviews are often the final trigger, and a good share of buyers check them before paying. A product with no reviews at all is worrying; a few honest reviews with photos from real customers reassure more than anything you write yourself. Set up an automatic review request a few days after delivery, show the ratings on product and category pages, and do not delete the middling reviews: a credible 4.3 beats a perfect 5.0 nobody believes.
Where to start: find where it bleeds most
Do not fix all six at once. Open your checkout funnel report (Shopify, WooCommerce or Google Analytics all provide one) and find the step where the drop is sharpest. Lots of people adding to cart but never paying? Look at shipping costs and checkout. Lots leaving at the product page? It is the page or the speed. Prioritize the step touching the most volume and the most money.
If you would rather we looked at it with you, that is exactly the job of the 15-minute diagnostic call: we open your numbers together, identify the leak costing you most, and tell you what to fix first. No waffle, just the place to recover sales you are already paying for.
Conversion funnel leaks — the same five leaks, service-business version.