Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Julia,
I'm not a big fan of online retail....until you've developed a local retail following. It's costly to rise about the noise.

If you really don't have this stuff yourself, you might want to have your friends promote it. YOu can twitter it and myspace and facebook it for free.

You can also do trafficswarm.com to generate traffic, but the website is not very compelling.

Michael

I'm afraid I agree with the others.

You probably didn't have a well-thought-out business plan when you went into this, or you could have figured out that the business wouldn't generate enough revenue to cover costs.

You could probably invest a lot of money driving traffic to your site, and a bunch more money on post-click marketing, but unless/until you understand who your target audience is, what they need, how they buy and make buying decisions, how they shop, etc., and how they're going to find your site, you're wasting your time and money. You don't have a compelling positioning (or product offering).

Cut your losses.

If you're committed to trying to figure out how to improve your website, start by unlisting it from Yahoo Shopping. Until you figure out how to convert your visitors into customers, you're throwing your money away.

So, what can you do? As others have mentioned, reposition it. Focus on a narrower list of products that are well-targeted to a few people. You can't be all things to all people, no matter how much you'd like to be. Pick one of your niches and figure out who's likely to want to purchase these items (hint: study the traffic for the various keywords of each of your product categories - pick the highest categories with the lowest # of competitors). Next, figure out how to attract these people to your site. SEO, social media, articles, blog postings, affiliate sales can all work for you. But it'll take time.

Once you unlock the secret formula for your niche, you can turn on the spigot - relist with Yahoo Shopping (if you want), or simply increase your PPC spending, etc. Oh, and make sure you have analytics installed for your website to understand who's visiting your website and what they're looking for.

I would agree to deslist it from yahoo shopping. Find a niche. You're all over the board with nick nacks to luggage. Why would someone choose you over a hundred other sites? What have you done to market your site? How did the 4 sales you have made come to you? Market your online biz as if it were a bricks & mortar store. Actually you have to market it more-- because there are so many online stores- if you had a bricks & mortar on Main St USA, you'd have people in that town at least walking or driving by you.

I'd recommend the book "Mining Online Gold with an Offline Shovel". It's old, probably in your library. But it will give you a good beginners plan to market your store.