Website traffic but no sales: a 5-step check for Saudi online stores

Traffic without sales usually comes from one of four places: sales that your tracking does not show, visitors who were never buyers, buyers on a page that cannot sell, or a buying path that breaks at one step. Check them in that order, using reports you already have: your platform’s order count, Google Analytics and Search Console.

This guide is for owners and e-commerce managers of stores that sell to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, on Salla, Zid, Shopify or WooCommerce. It is a diagnosis, not a list of tricks, and it quotes no conversion benchmark because we found no Gulf one we could verify. We read Google’s help pages, the help centres of Salla and Zid, and Baymard’s checkout research on 24 October 2026. Help pages change, so each finding names its source.

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The short answer

Step	What you may see	Where to look
1. Tracking	Your platform shows orders, analytics shows none	Platform orders against GA4 purchases
2. Visitors	Many sessions from one source, few engaged	GA4 Traffic acquisition
3. Landing pages	Visitors arrive on pages that cannot sell	Search Console queries per page
4. Buying path	One large drop between two steps	Platform funnel, GA4 purchase funnel
5. Test order	Something you only see by buying	Your own phone

Source: Google Analytics Help, Salla Help Center and Zid Help Center pages listed under Sources, read on 24 October 2026.

Step 1: Make sure the sales are really zero

Do this first, because every later number rests on it. Google says ecommerce events such as add_to_cart and purchase are not collected by Google Analytics automatically: your store has to send them. It also says that if an event is missing a required parameter, Analytics treats it as a custom event and leaves it out of the Ecommerce purchases report. A store can therefore show no purchases in analytics while orders arrive every day.

Pick one week. Count the completed orders in your platform, then the purchases for the same dates in Google Analytics, and compare. The platform is the source of truth for orders:

• Salla. Reports, then Store performance, then Conversion rate. Salla defines the rate as completed orders divided by total visits, times 100. Its Google Analytics page says you install the Google Analytics app from its App Store, choose your data stream, and wait up to 48 hours for data. The page does not say which ecommerce events the app sends.
• Zid. Dashboard, then Analytics, then Marketing, which shows visits, customers and a visits-to-orders rate. Zid’s Google Analytics page has you enter your G- measurement ID in its app and also does not list the events it sends. Some Zid indicators are only on the Professional and Large Business plans.
• Shopify. Google’s help lists add_to_cart, begin_checkout, add_payment_info and purchase as collected for you once Google Analytics is set up, and says add_shipping_info is yours to add. Neither list includes view_item, which the purchase funnel report needs, so check that step.

We read these pages and did not test a live Salla or Zid store, so we cannot say what each app sends. You can: place one test order with debug mode on, as Google’s ecommerce guide recommends, and watch whether a purchase event arrives with its transaction ID, value and currency. Google says purchase data appears in reports after about 24 hours.

One more trap. That funnel report is closed by default: a user who skips a step, for example by reaching checkout without a view_item event, is dropped from every later step. Google’s own toggle for an open funnel exists to evaluate broken experiences, so use it when the steps look wrong.

Step 2: Check who is visiting

Open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition in Google Analytics. It groups sessions by channel (Direct, Organic Search, Paid Social, Organic Social, Email and others). Read three columns for each channel:

• Sessions. Where the volume is.
• Engagement rate. Google counts a session as engaged if it lasted 10 seconds or more, had a key event, or had 2 or more page views.
• Session key event rate. The share of sessions with at least one key event, so check that purchase is marked as one.

A channel with thousands of sessions and a low engagement rate is sending people who never looked. A channel with high engagement and no purchases sends interested people who meet a problem later, which is steps 3 to 5. Compare channels against each other, not against a number from a blog. Three more checks on the visitors themselves:

• Place. Salla’s Google Analytics guide tells merchants to confirm that visitors match their target region, and says a sudden surge of traffic from another country can be a sign of a compromised site. Look at country and city for the same period.
• Bots. Google excludes known bots automatically, and you can neither switch that off nor see how much was removed. Traffic that Google does not know as a bot still shows up, so an odd country, a single device model or sessions of 0 seconds deserve a look.
• Social visits. Visits from apps may not be labelled by app. In StatCounter’s Saudi data Facebook sends 74.75% of social referrals, and WhatsApp, Snapchat and TikTok have no category at all (see our Saudi social media statistics), so tag the links you share with UTM parameters.

If you advertise, remember that Salla’s campaign table only lists campaigns that produced at least one order. A campaign with visits and no orders is invisible there, so look for it in Google Analytics.

Step 3: Check where they land

A buyer needs a page that can sell. Open Search Console, then Performance, and read the Queries and Pages tabs together (Google’s report also splits by Countries and Devices). For your top 10 landing pages, ask two questions.

Does the query want to buy? Salla’s guide names three kinds of search: informational, transactional and navigational. A reader asking how something works is not a buyer today, and a page built to answer them should offer a clear next step to the product. A shopper searching for a product who lands on a long article has to hunt for the product page. Our guide to Arabic keyword research for the Gulf shows how to find the phrases buyers use.

Does the page match the language and the device? An Arabic query that lands on an English page, or a category page with no visible products on a phone, loses people before any funnel step. Open each of the 10 pages on your phone and check that a visitor can reach a buy button in two taps.

This is the step where SEO can be the cause. If the pages that rank are the wrong ones, the fix is page design and internal links, not more traffic. If your store is not showing for buying queries at all, start with our store not showing on Google checklist.

Step 4: Find the step where the buying path breaks

Now follow the visitors who do reach a product page. Each platform draws the funnel in its own words, but the logic is the same:

• Salla: Visits, Add to cart, Cart view, Checkout started, Order completed.
• Zid: the customer path chart in Marketing analytics.
• Google Analytics: the purchase funnel (session_start, view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase) and the checkout funnel (begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info, purchase), both under Monetization.

Salla’s advice is the same as ours: start with the stage that shows the largest drop between one step and the next. Then read the drop like this:

Drop between	What it can mean	What to check
Visit and product view	Wrong visitors or wrong page	Steps 2 and 3
Product view and add to cart	The product page does not convince	Price, delivery date, photos, reviews, the button on a phone
Add to cart and checkout	A cost or a demand appears	Shipping cost, forced login, coupon box
Checkout and order	Payment or trust fails	Every payment method, errors, number of steps

Source: Salla conversion report and the Google Analytics purchase and checkout funnel help pages; the reading of each drop combines their examples.

Google’s examples agree. A drop between begin checkout and purchase may mean high shipping costs or buttons and links that do not work, and a drop between add shipping and add payment may mean high shipping costs or a login with no guest checkout. Salla’s examples add a wider range of payment methods for the first drop and a test of every payment method for the second.

Cart abandonment is normal, so do not expect zero. Baymard’s average across 50 studies is 70.22%, and in its US survey 42% of shoppers had abandoned a cart because they were just browsing. The useful part is why the rest left:

Reason in Baymard’s US survey	Share	Funnel step (our mapping)
Extra costs too high	40%	Cart to checkout
Delivery too slow	20%	Product page, cart
Did not trust the site with card details	19%	Checkout to order
Site wanted an account	18%	Cart to checkout
Checkout too long or complicated	17%	Checkout
Website errors or crashes	17%	Checkout

Source: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment statistics (US online shoppers, shares exclude the just-browsing group). These are US figures, not Saudi ones.

Your platform’s abandoned cart report helps, with limits you should know. Salla’s report counts only carts from the last 60 days and leaves out carts of visitors who did not log in, empty carts and Buy Now carts. If many of your customers pay as guests, their abandoned carts are invisible there, so compare it with the begin_checkout and purchase counts in Google Analytics. On Zid, per-cart details such as the customer’s name, phone and stage are not available on free plans, and reminder messages need purchased credit.

Step 5: Place one test order on a phone

Nothing replaces buying from your own store. In Saudi Arabia 98.4% of people use a mobile phone to go online (GASTAT, 2025, in our Saudi internet statistics), so do it on a phone, on mobile data, as a guest. Write down every moment you hesitate:

1. Open a product from a Google result, not from your home page.
2. Read the price, delivery date and return terms. Are they visible before you add to cart?
3. Add to cart and check whether the total, with shipping, is clear before you enter details.
4. Pay with a mada card, then with the phone wallet you use in shops. SAMA data shows phones took 50.6% of Saudi in-store card spending in 2025 (see Saudi digital payments statistics), so shoppers are used to paying that way in a shop. Whether your checkout offers it is something one order shows you. Try cash on delivery if you offer it.
5. Repeat in Safari on an iPhone and in Chrome on an Android phone, in Arabic and in English.
6. Time each page. Google’s good thresholds for loading, responsiveness and stability are an LCP within 2.5 seconds, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less and a CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads across mobile and desktop.

Every cost, error and extra form you find is a lead for the drop you found in step 4.

A worked example: 75% more visits, 6 more orders

Salla’s own conversion report example shows why this order matters. Last month, 4,000 visits and a 3% conversion rate. This month, 7,000 visits and 1.8%. Our calculation from those figures:

Month	Visits	Conversion rate	Orders
Last month	4,000	3%	120
This month	7,000	1.8%	126

Khaleej SEO calculation: visits x conversion rate. Visits grew 75%, orders grew 5%, 6 more orders.

More traffic poured into a leak adds almost nothing. Salla reads this case the same way: a smaller share of the visitors bought, so check the product pages, the loading speed and the funnel. Fixing the leak first makes every visitor you later add worth more.

When it is an SEO problem and when it is not

It is usually an SEO problem when:

• the pages that rank are reading pages, not buying pages;
• Arabic queries land on English pages or the reverse;
• the page that ranks for a product query is a thin category page or a blog post;
• Search Console shows many impressions for words no buyer uses.

It is not an SEO problem when:

• analytics and platform order counts disagree (tracking);
• the funnel drops at shipping cost, payment methods or checkout errors;
• the visitors come from a source that was never going to buy.

No ranking work fixes a broken checkout, and no checkout work fixes the wrong visitors. That is why we mark each finding in an audit as search, store or tracking, so the right person fixes it. Our ecommerce SEO audit checklist lists the 24 checks on the search side. Our e-commerce SEO and Salla SEO work covers the search side, our technical SEO work covers rendering, speed and tracking checks, and we explain how we work with Saudi stores on our Saudi Arabia SEO page. Setting up Search Console on Salla takes minutes with our Salla Search Console guide, and our Salla or Zid comparison lists what each platform lets you control.

Sources

Opened on 24 October 2026. In Analytics Help: Purchase journey report, Checkout journey report, Ecommerce purchases report, Traffic acquisition report, Known bot-traffic exclusion. From the developer guides: Measure ecommerce (14 October 2026), Set up a purchase event (9 October 2024). Also from the Google family: Search Console Performance report, Web Vitals on web.dev (31 October 2024). Salla Help Center: conversion rate reports (29 August 2026), abandoned cart reports (1 September 2026), connect Google Analytics (28 August 2026), understand customers with Google Analytics (27 August 2026). Zid Help Center (Arabic): Google Analytics (13 August 2026), marketing analytics (6 August 2026), abandoned carts (4 August 2026). Baymard Institute: cart abandonment rate statistics. Saudi figures: GASTAT and SAMA, as compiled on our own pages linked above.

Not sure where your store loses buyers? Our free 5-point audit checks your landing pages, tracking and buying path on Salla, Zid, Shopify or any other platform, and tells you what to fix first. No obligation, delivered within 48 hours. Request your free SEO audit.