When sales fall, the first thing almost everyone does is raise the ad budget or run a discount, and the logic looks sound on the surface. But the trouble is that “my sales are down” is a final number with a whole chain of events sitting behind it, and until you know which link in that chain is broken, ad money just passes through the healthy links and piles up behind the broken one. In this piece I want to open up that chain for you and show you how, with a few simple numbers, you can tell which link your sales drop actually started at.
Nominal Sales, or Real Sales?
Before you go hunting for a culprit, do one simple calculation, because in Iran’s economy a sales figure in toman proves nothing on its own. In 1404 (the Iranian year running into 2026) point-to-point inflation climbed from 31.4% to 73.5%, so if your toman sales are flat versus last year, your real sales have roughly halved, and even if you grew 20% you still went backwards.
So instead of toman sales, look at counts: how many orders, how many customers, how many units. Counts don’t lie, because inflation doesn’t touch them. If your order count is flat but your toman revenue dropped, the problem is pricing or product mix. But if the order count itself fell, then a link in the sales chain really is broken and you need to find it.
Sales Isn’t a Number, It’s a Chain
Every sale that happens has passed through four links: people first have to see you, then take a step and enter, then decide and buy, and finally come back again. If any one of these links weakens, the total revenue drops, and the signal you see is the same in every case, that one sentence, “my sales are down.”
- Visibility, measured by site visits, page reach, or ad impressions.
- Entry, meaning how many of those people took a step, like sending a DM, calling, or adding an item to the cart.
- Conversion, meaning how many of the ones who entered actually paid in the end.
- Repeat, meaning what share of buyers came back a second time.
What you need to do is compare each link’s number from three months ago with today’s. The first link that dropped is where the problem starts, and the decline in the others is usually a knock-on effect of that one. If you don’t have these numbers, the problem is far more serious, because it means you have no eyes and you’re deciding blind.
Which Link Is Broken?
Link Zero: A Market That Shrank
Before those four links there’s a link zero that many people don’t count at all, and that’s the market itself, because if people’s purchasing power drops, your sales drop too without you doing anything wrong. This is exactly what has happened in Iran: according to Donya-ye Eqtesad, private consumption growth in spring 1404 came in at minus 1.1%, the fourth consecutive declining quarter, and EcoIran’s figures show that in Esfand 1404 (the last month of the year) the real value of the average transaction fell by more than 20%. Part of that drop was because of the war, so the traditional Nowruz (Persian New Year) shopping effectively contracted. But part of it is simply people’s shrinking household budgets.
If you run an online business, one more factor gets added on top: internet disruption. According to published estimates, over roughly 74 days of disruption the country’s digital economy took somewhere between 300 and 700 trillion toman in direct and indirect losses, and users spent more than 60% of the early days of 2026 without stable access to the global internet. If your sales fell in that same window, part of your drop isn’t about your decisions at all.
There’s a third factor people think about less, and that’s competition, because even if the market stays the same size, if the number of sellers grows, your share automatically shrinks. In its 1402 report, Digikala announced that its seller count grew 36% to more than 418,000, and its product variety grew 29% to 12.5 million. So if you sell on that same platform and your sales are flat, you’ve actually fallen behind everyone else.
So how do you tell whether the problem is the market or you? Check your share of the market, because if your sales fell 30% and your competitors fell by roughly the same, the market itself shrank and the problem isn’t you. But if you dropped and your competitor didn’t, then the problem is internal. This distinction matters, because in a shrunken market the right answer is protecting your margin and keeping your existing customers, not pouring money into ads to grab a bigger slice of a smaller cake.
Link One: You’re Not Seen
Here the signal is clear, because your site visits or page reach are down versus three months ago, while the other links are healthy, meaning the small number who do come still buy at the same rate as before. The common causes are that you depended on one channel and that channel weakened, or the algorithm is showing your page to fewer people, or content that used to work has gone stale.
Depending on a single channel is a big risk in Iran, and the data backs it up: according to the E-Commerce Association’s internet commission, the heaviest dependence on Instagram belongs to home and small retail businesses, and specifically to women, which is exactly the group with the least ability to switch channels. If all your sales come from one channel, you don’t have a business, you have a rented business whose landlord can evict you whenever they like.
The key point is that if this link is broken, discounting is completely useless, because there’s no one there to see the discount.
Link Two: You’re Seen, but No One Enters
This case means your visits and reach are the same as before but the number of messages, calls, and add-to-carts has dropped, and here the problem is almost never the amount of traffic, it’s the offer you’re making. Either people can’t tell in the first few seconds what exactly you sell and how you’re different, or they can tell but don’t see enough reason to pay that price.
Another very common cause is that you didn’t change but your competitor did, meaning the same offer that was attractive last year has become the market’s minimum expectation this year. For example, when free shipping or a seven-day return policy becomes normal in your industry, not having it is no longer a small disadvantage, it’s a reason to leave.
Link Three: They Enter, but Don’t Buy
This is the most common broken link, and its signal is that the cart fills up or the conversation starts but never reaches payment. Interestingly, this problem isn’t unique to small businesses, because Digikala itself wrote in its 1402 report that more than 26,546,000 carts were abandoned and never completed, and the top reason, according to its own survey, was the shipping cost.
The point of this example is that the shipping cost is a surprise figure shown to the customer at the very end, and what scares people off is usually not the number itself but finding out about it too late. The same thing takes other shapes in your business, like a price that isn’t stated until the end of the conversation, a delivery time that only becomes clear after the order is placed, or a prepayment condition that surfaces halfway through.
The other causes of this link usually come back to trust: no reviews or past-customer experiences, no real way to get in touch, or slow responses, which in today’s market are themselves a signal of untrustworthiness.
Link Four: They Buy, but Don’t Come Back
This is the quietest link, because it declines little by little and doesn’t show up month to month, but it’s also the most dangerous. If customers don’t come back, you’re forced to start from zero every month and your entire growth is tied to your ad budget, meaning you have a leaky bucket where however much you pour in from the top runs out the bottom.
This link matters most in conditions where people’s purchasing power has fallen, because in a shrunken market acquiring a new customer is both harder and more expensive, whereas an existing customer already knows you and has trusted you once before. If you don’t know what percentage of your customers come back a second time, work that number out tonight, because it’s probably the most important number you’ve never looked at. That said, this depends a lot on the type of business and what it sells. For example, if you own a men’s barbershop and a customer doesn’t come back every month, they’ve probably switched barbers, so this link is very serious for you. But if you run a car dealership, a person might buy from you once and never change their car again, or buy used next time, or want a brand you simply don’t carry. So a customer isn’t always winnable back, and the reason they didn’t return isn’t necessarily buying from a competitor or a problem with your product or service. You have to judge this in the context of your own business.
So Why Doesn’t More Advertising Usually Work?
Now that you’ve seen the chain, the answer to this question is simple, because advertising only works on the first link: it brings more people to the mouth of the chain. If the break is in link one, advertising really does work. But if the break is in link three or four, you’re just sending more people toward the same closed door, and paying for each of them.
The worst case is that advertising lifts the sales number for a short while, and that makes you think the problem is solved, when all you did was cover a break with more money. As long as the broken link stays where it is, every toman you spend costs you more than before, and your business gets addicted to advertising.
The right order is to first find the broken link, then fix only that one, and only then raise the ad budget. If you increase advertising after repairing the chain, the same budget produces more, because this time the people you bring in reach the end of the chain.
In Short
So if your sales are down, first look at order counts instead of the toman figure to see whether you really dropped or inflation just shifted the number, then go to the four links and place each one’s number from three months ago next to today’s to find the first link that broke. Remember that part of the drop may not be yours at all and may trace back to a shrinking market and infrastructure disruption, and the way to tell is to compare yourself with competitors. Until you’ve found the broken link, more advertising is just the cost of that same break.
If you want to run this check more systematically, grab the Business Bottleneck Checklist, where I’ve written the right questions for each part of your business so you can tell where the problem is. And if you’ve worked out the numbers but still aren’t sure which link in your sales chain is broken, you can book a free diagnostic session and we’ll go through your sales chain together.