Fixing the Sales Leaks

Siti ran an online fashion retailer in Malaysia. Her Instagram looked great, her website got thousands of visitors, but sales barely moved. Shoppers browsed her collections, some added dresses or tops to their cart, then vanished. She watched potential customers disappear at every step. She needed to know where she was losing them and how to fix it.

She hired an analyst to study 500,000 shopping sessions. The analyst tracked everything: which products people viewed, what they added to cart, who started checkout, who completed purchases. The data covered five marketing channels—Email, Paid Search, Social, Organic, and Direct. It also showed whether customers shopped on mobile or desktop, and included results from an A/B test Siti was running. The goal was simple: find where customers dropped off and which channels actually brought buyers.

The funnel showed two massive leaks. Most people who viewed her fashion products never added anything to their cart. Then, half the shoppers who did add items quit before checkout. Her product pages weren't convincing people to buy, and her checkout process was losing customers who were already interested. These two points explained why traffic didn't turn into sales.

The analyst compared marketing channels. Email brought customers who actually bought. Paid Search performed almost as well. Social was decent. But Organic and Direct traffic barely converted. Siti had been treating all traffic the same, but email subscribers and paid search visitors were far more likely to complete a purchase. She was wasting money trying to grow channels that didn't deliver real buyers.

Mobile shoppers converted better than desktop users—both for adding items to cart and finishing checkout. This surprised Siti. She'd assumed mobile was just for browsing and inspiration. The data said otherwise. Mobile customers were ready to buy. Her mobile experience was already working. Desktop needed the improvement.

The A/B test showed Variant A didn't increase cart additions, but slightly more people completed checkout with it. The difference was small but real. Customers felt more confident finishing their purchase with Variant A, even though it didn't help earlier in the funnel. Siti decided to keep testing it, focusing on checkout improvements.

One finding stood out: customers from email converted best, but viewing too many products or adding too many items to cart actually lowered the chance of purchase. When people browsed heavily without buying, they were overwhelmed or confused, not engaged. Siti realized she needed clearer product recommendations and simpler choices to guide customers, not endless options.

Siti restructured everything. She shifted marketing budget to Email and Paid Search, cutting spend on Organic and Direct until she fixed those channels. She rewrote product pages with better photos, clearer descriptions, and stronger styling suggestions to reduce the first leak. She simplified checkout to stop losing people at the finish line. She prioritized mobile optimization since those customers were already converting. Today, Siti doesn't guess where problems are. She knows which channels work, where customers get stuck, and what changes actually increase sales.