:: converting traffic to sales: a plea ::

[ the lemonade stand, by a sense of place photography. for sale on etsy. ]

i want to come to you tonight with a lovely blog post. something inspiring, perhaps. something cheeky? ooh, maybe something useful. but every single ounce of ingenuity i have is being put to other use tonight, namely to the task of trying to stand back and objectively judge my e-commerce site.

last week i did a little self audit and discovered that 35% of my income comes from etsy, 32% from wedding clients, 30% from custom graphic design clients, and only 4% from my own e-commerce site even though i get a lot of traffic there.

and spend a significant chunk of my advertising budget (read: 100% of my advertising budget) on bringing people to the site.

needless to say i am insert-trite-adjective-describing-my-deflated-state-here.

my first reaction was to throw up my hands and say go screw, own e-comm site. who needs you and your ad-budget-sucking-powers, anyway? and just delete the whole thing and stop promoting it, redirecting people to my etsy site instead.

my next reaction was to throw up my hands and say maybe instead of attending the national stationery show next may, i should spent all of my remaining business budget to have someone build a custom e-commerce solution in the hopes that maybe-just-maybe building it will indeed make them come. but that's, um, stupid. (not that we say stupid in our house, mind you, because it's not e very nice word to say. and yes, i am now thinking of my three year old son who will not in fact be reading this blog post until he is old enough to fully understand that we do say stupid in this house sometimes.)

my third reaction was to sit here for an hour and a half and stare at my site and look around at my favorite stores and try to be objective about how to improve my own site without spending mega mucho.

so now i turn it over to you. i need your honest feedback. why do you think that visits aren't converting to sales in my shop when the same exact products are converting to sales on etsy. i'm getting traffic. i'm using the same images and descriptions. my custom site has features like drop-down options for each product, unlike etsy. but not many sales.

help a girl out?