Short answer: when traffic reaches the checkout page and zero of them complete the purchase, it is almost never the ad or the audience. Trust and price hesitation drop people earlier, before they ever reach checkout. A checkout that people reach and none finish is a mechanical break at the last step.
Read the funnel, not the total
Pull the breakdown: visits, add-to-cart, reached-checkout, purchase. The shape tells you where it broke. If a handful of people reached the checkout page and the purchase count is zero, they wanted to buy enough to start paying and something stopped them at the payment screen. That is a different failure from a page nobody adds to cart on.
People who reach checkout have already decided to buy. If none of them finish, the question is not “how do I persuade them,” it is “what is physically blocking the payment.”
Why it is not persuasion or trust
A trust or price problem shows up as a thin top of the funnel: fewer people add to cart, fewer reach checkout at all. It does not usually let seven people reach the payment page and then stop all seven. When the drop is entirely at reached-checkout to purchase, adding review badges and trust seals treats a symptom that is not there.
The four things that actually stop a checkout
- No payment method their country can use: a store set to cards only, shown to buyers whose region pays by local wallet or transfer, ends at the payment screen every time.
- Shipping cost revealed only at checkout: a price that looked fine on the product page jumps at the last step and they leave.
- A card gateway failing or a required 3D-Secure step breaking on mobile.
- A forced account creation or a long address form between the cart and the pay button.
The test that settles it in ten minutes
Open the exact product link your ads point to on a phone, from your target country or a VPN into it, and go all the way to the payment field. Watch for which payment methods appear, what the shipping line says at checkout, and how many fields stand between the cart and paying. You will usually find the block yourself before any ad change would have.
Only go back to the ad if the drop is upstream, where few people reach checkout in the first place. A checkout that lets people in and none out is a store fix, not an ad fix, and no amount of new creative or budget will move it.