is my design getting in the way of conversion?

seo speaking your site could use a lot more text. The text to html ratio is 9.46% on the front page according to my diagnostics .... also, there are no meta keywords registering. There's also no rss feed appearing for your site. Fix the obvious, then concentrate on conversions ... because it's easier to figure out why only 1,000 out of a million visitors are converting, instead of why none out of 1,000 are.

I obviously don't know how much traffic you're getting, but from experience I can tell you it takes an ASS LOAD of targeted traffic to convert on affiliate marketing ... and to do it regularly in amounts large enough to substantiate a regular income? Tens of thousands of targeted.

and don't expect any of em to come back, because they aren't buying from you ... the final step on your site is to leave and go elsewhere to whip out the plastic. If they want to buy again, they'll just go to site that they're actually doing business with.

Sorry, not trying to be a downer .... you can do it for sure. It just takes work, money and time.

some of your sharesale links in the lighting department on your site aren't active, also.

without sounding like the big bad wolf here,

Think the site needs alot of styling work, at the moment theres no logical placings for some things, it would seem you just wanted to get the content on the page without so much concern for how one would find that content in the simplest way possible, I would assume this is why you are getting few repeat visitors, If one finds a site easier to navigate they'll most likely head there... I could be wrong of course

I would start there, and some advice if you do...
- redo the list menu at the top, having to move my cursor all over the screen just to open boxes I didnt know existed is time consuming
- your twitter links are set to open in the same window, taking the user off the page with no way back but re-searching or using the back button, youre ideally wanting to keep them on your site indefintely.. use the target-"_blank" option to have it open in a new window
- you have headers over-laying some links also, some fine tuning needed here


all in all, as an outdoorsy person I love what youre doing for the world

Hi allpurposeguru,

You're right. If you're not converting the traffic you're currently getting your returns on larger amounts of traffic will be insignificant.

People are weary of buying from sites they have never purchased from before. Use this knowledge to your advantage.

My suggestion is to replace your buy now buttons on the product pages with a price comparison unit. A buy now button indicates to the user that they are going to buy through your site, whereas a price comparison unit gives them useful information they can use to make a better buying decision and offers them the added benefit of shopping with sites they are already familiar with. And even if they are not familiar with some of them, the sites you are redirecting them too have already invested time and money in systems that increase consumer trust such as Verisign SSL certs., Consumer Trust Badges, High end shopping cart systems etc...

In short, it's easier to leverage the authority of well established retailers than to try and become an authority site yourself, especially if your not selling your own inventory to begin with.

This allows you to focus on becoming a trusted source of information on quality products which is a much easier battle to win.

Live well,
Mike

Great ideas so far. Thanks everyone. I have some technical difficulties:

1. My theme is called Acquisto. I bought it on the advice of the tech who designed the site, and he's apparently a better web designer than marketer. He no longer works at the firm I hired, but I wasn't especially happy with their slow service, anyway.

2. That home page isn't really a page. Whenever I add a product, it goes there. I can make some "sticky" but otherwise have no control over the order of how anything appears anywhere. (The best plugin I have found breaks the site.)

3. I have no idea how to add text to the home "page."

4. It was supposed to syndicate one of my blogs. If anyone looked at the blog tab, it hasn't been updated since last September. There has been a new post every week; they just no longer show up here. Not knowing php, I don't know how to fix it.

5. Since it's on a separate page, I don't know if it had much SEO value anyway. I have been wondering about product reviews, but they, too, would be a menu item.

I think I can figure out how to do some of the things you've suggested so far. Otherwise, short of spending several hundred clams to another designer, does anyone have any suggestions?

A clean design so far. You may be targeting a good keyword. But keyword density is low.