Review my Amazon Affiliate site (be honest!)

Hey, i never suggest to use e-commerce theme/site to make money with Amazon. People buy from Amazon cause they trust the site. Your site is unknown. People must add the items to cart, then check out and finally they see that they`re buying from Amazon. Even if you get some traffic to your site you will get a minimum amount of sales (if any). These sites just kill conversions. The idea with Amazon affiliate sites are to send the traffic to Amazon, let the visitors (potential buyers) surf on Amazon and they will buy (anything) and you get the commission. Easy as that. If the visitors are on Amazon then Amazon will do the rest.

Cheers

Nice website but the color combination is looking a bit awkward. But I hope it will convert for you. Best of luck Op!

Thank you both for taking the time to check out the site.

Bymarcot, those were my exact concerns when I started this project but others have seemed to have some success with this model and these plugins so I thought I would give it a try. The thing that really drew me to this was that the Amazon Affiliates plug-in for WooCommerce has a 90 day cookie (which won't matter if people never get to Amazon...)

Mubashirshafi - Please let me know what you mean by awkward. I thought the light blue with the white was nice and might catch some hipster kids...maybe I'm off...

IMO the font is too large for the welcome text, maybe bring it down by about 25% or so. The site took a VERY long time to load on my computer here in Arizona.

What did you use to build the site, is it some sort of CMS? What plugins are you using?

Hi Josh, thank you for taking the time to check out my site. I agree about the initial welcome text and reduced the size.

I have also noticed the long load time and I'm at a loss at the moment for how to improve that. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

I built it using the Virtue Premium theme for WordPress. The Plugins I currently have are:

AdSense Privacy Policy -Version 1.1.1
Akismet - Version 2.6.0 - (currently not activated)
All in One SEO Pack - Version 2.1.4
Cyclone Slider Pro - Version 2.8.2
Page Builder by SiteOrigin - Version 1.4.7
Revolution Slider - version 4.1.4
WooCommerce - Version 2.1.6
Woo Commerce Amazon Affiliates - Wordpress Plugin - Version 5.0.1
WP Super Cache - Version 1.4

Really nice niche to be in. IMO some of the fonts are too large and mixed match. You might want to also remove the number of products in your sidebar since the numbers go below the category name.

Nice looking...crisp and clean!!! Easy to browse through and find what you want. My load time was only a few seconds, 3 maybe. Good job, I hope I can get my PLR webstore to look as nice!

Ok here is my review a quick rundown:

Design

- Design looks cool, clean and targeted to sport/basketball
- Too much text on the first page (looks ugly) don't mention Amazon here
- You are missing pictures of real people that are showing the products specially on the homepage

Technical

- Your redirect is not working so I could not shop on Amazon
- Make sure that the prices that you are showing are the same like on Amazon (cron job)
- Long waiting time (Start with VPS 50$ per month and get a cache!)

Seo/Cost

- Product description and that is the key point are very weak you probably got already hit by Google 100% copy of Amazon's descriptions
- Take the Amazon reviews out otherwise you get the same duplicate problem
You have two options write it by your own or get it written.
- Most expensive part 250 products x 5$ = 1250$
- Reviews a bit cheaper but still 50$-100$ per month
- Same goes for blog posts 1 daily 30 x 5$ = 150$ per month
- Sure you can write by your self but it will be a lot of work
- No Backlinks!!
- No Social Media/ Social Signals/ Comments etc
- Meta Titles/descriptions are too long
- Optimize the blog posts (more pictures, easy to read etc)

Competition

- You have strong competition for this kind of products
- Any Plans to be better then the other sport shoe shops? Videos, Basketball Tricks, Interviews, Great Pictures etc something that the others don't have
- Check who is the competitor (all pretty good and the list is endless)
finishline.com
sneakernews.com
sneakerhead.com
pickyourshoes.com
nicekicks.com

Trust

- The domain name is ugly (too long, hard to spell)
- About page needs some real information with a person/company that runs the website
- Telephone number, address etc
- Security checked? Place a logo that proofs that it is safe.
- Payment options?

Check if you are not violating the Amazon TOS.

And the most important factor calculate if you can make a winning. Especially when you sell lower priced products via Amazon. In my opinion at least 5000$ worth of content + seo optimization + time investment + 300$ monthly cost. But when I look at the competitors even more then that. That is a good amount of products (100k in sales with 5% commission) that needs to be sold. What is the average basket size 50-100$? Over 1000 baskets...
And now my personal opinion stop dreaming of "easy" passive income with copying Amazon products. Sooner or later you will get hit by Google. You need cash that you can invest especially when there are so much competitors out there.

Choose who you want to be (so far you are a beggar, be a trader!):
http://www.officenomore.com/thiefs-b...-money-online/

Hope I could help and good luck!

Thank you everyone for your responses. Sorry for my delay, I've been dealing some issues in my "real job" and haven't had time to focus on this.

LonelyIsland, I really appreciate your detailed breakdown. Here are my responses:

Design:
I removed the block of text I had. I agree, it didn't look good there.
I agree that I need more pictures of people using the products but I'm not really sure how to go about that. The only 100% legit way I know of, is to actually buy the products and do my own photos so I own the content. I would love to be able to just re-post a Nike or Adidas ad, but I'm guessing that might get me in trouble

Technical:

Thank you for letting me know about the re-direct. It appears this is only affecting people using Firefox and I have opened a support ticket with the plug-in developer to correct this.

I do have a cron job set to refresh the prices every 15 minutes that has been running correctly but I have noticed a couple of price discrepancies myself. Maybe I should increase the frequency of the update?

I'm not really sure what to do about the long waiting time. I'm not ready to invest $50 a month for a VPS until I'm sure this is something I want to keep going forward with.

SEO/cost:

I'm slowly working on going through and re-writing all of the product descriptions. Going to be quite a job though...I'm not in a place where I can afford to hire out the work so I'll have to plug away when I have free time.

I really haven't begun to work on the backlinks and the promoting aspect. I did set up a Twitter and Facebook account but haven't done much with either of them. The blog posts were done quickly, really I just wanted to have something there to see what it would look like.

Competition:
Yes, there is a ton of competition in this niche. All of those sites you have listed are great. Honestly, it's somewhat intimidating looking at those sites and trying to figure out how to make my site stand out. Obviously need to put some more work into this.

Trust:
I thought the domain name was good, a nice combo of product reliability and branding but I do appreciate your comment. Not a lot I can do about it now though...
I agree, about page needs work. I'll have to focus on that soon.

I re-read the Amazon TOS and I do think this plugin I'm using may be violating it. I'm worried about the fact that the plug-in downloads the images when the Amazon TOS specifically says not to do this but to only use a link to said image.

I was wondering what section you thought I was violating though? Is it the lack of date by the price? I have a cron job set for every 15 minutes and the TOS stats you only need to include the date if the prices aren't updated hourly. I do see that I need to include the disclaimer that the content is from Amazon and subject to change.

I'm honestly not sure if I can make a winning on this or not. Certainly not if I hire out all of the writing...Thank you for sharing the article, I agree, I'm more of a beggar now than a trader. I guess I need to re-evaluate my approach and figure out how to become more of a trader...I guess I was hoping that I could create 5 to 6 of these types of sites in different niches and make some kind of profit. Perhaps that was naïve thinking on my part.

i suggested that make your fan page and run some giveaway and some cash back

I would call it hi-ho.net or something your URL is way too long esp on mobile

Disable the Caching plugin and check if prices get updated better.

*out of topic*
how is your traffic buddy ? Alexa says 1.200.000 rank. Does it start to generate some traffic ?

Thanks

This bit
http://hightopsandhoops.com/wp-conte...fitifade50.jpg
And the links on it, are absolutely terrible. They ruin the site for me, and make it look like you made it in wysiwyg web builder.

Other than that it looks pretty cool.

Thanks for checking. I have been generating traffic but still really haven't put much into it. Currently I'm getting between 50-80 sessions a day. I think once I start putting some more effort into the blog and backlinking, that should improve quite a bit.

Would you mind elaborating on this? Do you not like the image? Is it the opacity? Does the image need to be more relevant? Should there be no image at all? Any font suggestions for the links?

Thanks for your time!

Is there any way to integrate this service into a mobile app?

do you make all those banners by your self? Where did you get the images, needs some clean up but looks good. Any sales?

Have you started to make commission off this site? It does look nice, must say. I just did add to cart and it shows but then when I goto view cart, it says its empty.

What did you use to make this?

You can add social media sharing button which ensure more traffic