Why are my e-commerce sales declining?

Should you reinvent the business when sales slip?

Not yet. When a business that used to work starts struggling, the instinct is a new product, a new look or a new website. Hold off. It should be as simple as doing what was working before and scaling it, but with the modern context.

So before you change anything, work out what already changed.

How do you compare your best month with this month?

Ask three questions. What did you do in the best month you’ve had in the last five years? What did you do this month? What’s the difference? Because that’s the gap.

Then rebuild that best month from evidence, not memory. Here’s the order I’d do it in.

1. Pull every email campaign you sent in that period from your email platform, and note who each one went to.
2. Pull the ads you were running from your ad account, including the ones you’d forgotten about.
3. Check what the website looked like at the time. The Wayback Machine is good for this.
4. Write down the product range, the offers and the messaging.
5. Put it all on one visual board, then do the same for this month and lay the two side by side.

Look at the lead-up as well as the month itself. If your customers take a while to decide, the sales in a big month were created by what you did in the months before it. Pull those months too.

Review the board before you sit down to plan, so the plan starts from what actually happened.

What does the gap usually show?

Sometimes it’s obvious once it’s on the board. Fewer emails, an offer you quietly stopped running, ads that look nothing like the ones that worked.

Sometimes it’s harder to see. Founders often carry an instinct for product, taste or the customer that never got written down. When they step back from it, nothing breaks at once. There’s a little bit of magic the founder has, it gets lost, and the business slowly struggles. It’s not fast, which is why it’s so hard to spot.

I worked with one brand that had years of steady, predictable growth. When we went looking, the slowdown lined up roughly with the founder handing over a job they used to do themselves.

The founder doesn’t need to take everything back. Work out whether there’s a piece that’s been lost or a piece that could be codified, write it down, and build it into how the team works. Often that means the founder steps in as the editor who signs off the work, rather than the person doing all of it.

Then close the gap with today’s tools. If your best month ran on the founder talking to camera, the modern version might add customer UGC alongside it.

Why does growth come in lumps?

The other cause I see a lot is lopsided effort.

Growth comes from four functions on repeat. Attraction finds new people. Your website captures them as subscribers or leads. Email and your CRM convert them into customers. Post-sale systems turn customers into repeat buyers and referrals, which starts the loop again. Growing a business is just doing those four things repeatedly until you sell the company, and the better you get at those four cycles, the faster it grows.

Where businesses completely stuff it up is going too heavy on one of those functions and creating a lumpy business.

Spend a month pushing traffic and you flood the business with leads you can’t convert. Spend a month hammering the list and eventually you’ve emailed everyone on it who’s going to buy. Spend a month rebuilding the website and the emails stop going out. Revenue goes up and down like a rollercoaster, it’s stressful, and you’re always on the back foot.

How do you keep growth steady?

Split your effort across all four functions every month. Some new traffic, some work on capture, a steady email cadence, and something for the customers you already have. None of them gets a month off.

When sales slip, run both checks. Compare your best month with this one to find what’s stopped, then look at which of the four functions has gone without attention lately. Fix that one first, without dropping the other three.