Choosing help to fix a store that isn't converting

You've had your store live for weeks or months. Traffic is coming, maybe even decent traffic, but sales aren't following. Or conversion is crawling at a fraction of what your developer promised. Before you assume the problem is your marketing or your product, you need to know whether it's your store itself—and whether the person who built it is the right person to fix it.

Conversion problems in e-commerce rarely have a single cause, and they span both technical and commercial ground. A developer skilled at *architecture*—databases, payment gateways, API integrations—may not excel at the *experience* side: page speed, checkout friction, mobile responsiveness, product information hierarchy. Equally, someone excellent at UX might lack the backend chops to diagnose why your conversion funnel is leaking at a specific step. Knowing which weakness you're hiring for, and which specialist to bring in, matters far more than hoping one person fixes everything.

Track the leak before you hire anyone

Don't call a developer yet. Use your analytics to identify where visitors drop off. Are people abandoning at the product page, the cart, the checkout, or after selecting payment? Are mobile users converting at a vastly different rate than desktop? Is it one product category or all of them? Most abandonment has a pattern, and your data will point to whether this is a user-experience problem, a technical error, a trust signal missing, or a pricing perception issue. When you brief potential helpers, this specificity will separate the vague "we'll improve conversion" from someone who can actually diagnose and address your exact bottleneck.

Conversion fixes demand different skill sets

If your leak is at checkout—people are loading the cart but not completing purchase—you need someone who understands payment flows, form optimisation, and error handling. Ask candidates directly: have they reduced checkout abandonment on similar stores? What did they change? Demand examples.

If your leak is at product discovery—people browse but don't click through—you're hiring for merchandising and information architecture, not back-end code. A good candidate here will ask about your search results, category filtering, product descriptions, and images before they mention anything technical.

If speed is the culprit—pages drag, carts stall, checkout crawls—you need someone versed in performance debugging: image optimisation, lazy loading, caching strategy, server response times. This is specialist territory; many developers can build a store but few deeply understand performance tuning.

The mistake is assuming one person handles all three. Some do. But if your developer is stronger in one area, be honest about it and consider bringing in a specialist for the others.

Look for store conversion *case studies*, not just build portfolios

When you review a candidate's past work, ask specifically about post-launch performance. Did they build stores that stayed live and traded? Did they come back to optimise them after launch? Can they show you before-and-after conversion metrics from real projects? (Numbers matter: a developer claiming "improved conversion by 15%" is more credible than one saying "optimised the store".)

If they have no post-launch data to share, or if they only talk about design and features, they may not think systemically about the conversion journey. That's a signal.

Understand the scope of what you're asking them to change

A store that isn't converting often needs tweaks across multiple layers:

• Technical audit – speed, errors, mobile rendering, payment gateway health
• User experience review – checkout steps, form fields, trust signals, call-to-action clarity
• Content and merchandising – product descriptions, images, pricing display, category logic
• Analytics setup – proper event tracking so you know what's actually happening

A developer might handle the first; a UX designer the second; a merchandiser the third. Be clear with candidates about whether you're hiring them to do all four or whether you're starting with one area and building from there. If they quote you a flat fee to "fix conversion," push back and ask what's included. Vague scope leads to vague results.

When you're comparing candidates, the key isn't who sounds most confident. It's who asks the most specific questions about *your* data, *your* traffic, *your* products, and who can show you they've solved similar problems on other stores. That diligence upfront will save you from hiring someone smart but misaligned for your actual problem. Strove lets you search for developers with e-commerce specialisation and read reviews from other store owners—start there, and cross-reference their work against the questions you've learned to ask.