Can I expand on this store as it is ?

I have a store that, to date, has been a relative success, (in my terms) and now I want to expand.

The site was originaly set up to sell Blank DVD's, not cheap rubbish ones, but high quality products, and has been marketed as a Data Storage Solutions provider.

We have been 'plodding along' nicely with a steady flow of orders per month, but I want to expand to other computer products, as it's a product area that I have a lot of knowledge in.

Here's my quandry, our tag is Data Storage Solutions, so do I;

A) Just add 50 zillion different products to our site that although are electronic, have no direct relationship to Data Storage Solutions,

or

B) Set up a secondary site to cater for this market.

I realise the market for PC parts and other Electronic gadgets is quite saturated and that means it may take 12-18 months to realise any steady business flow, whereas we get a steady flow of visitors to our existing site who may be interested in other products.

I'm tending to Option A at this moment, purely becaue I have a customer base already, but I put this out here so that I could get other opinions..

Ohh what to do..!! If only I had a Crystal Ball.

Thanks for reading..

Mike

How about adding just a bit more for now and see?

The most important thing is to structure your site so that it's very easy to get to the main products you are selling. You dont want them to get confused with the new products and hence lose sales. Add 50 more products that are closely related to the ones you are selling so you can cross sell nicely and see if your "total" per order rise.

Just add 50 zillion different products to our site that although are electronic, have no direct relationship to Data Storage Solutions,
Think about this and what others are and I believe that you will come to the proper conclusion that your domain name is not as important as you may be thinking, while it can be part.
Consider, NewEgg, Geeks, AMD, ASUS, and many others where the domain name is not descriptive of the products available.
To the rescue is the meta description selector for categories/sub-cats and for each product. These, when used with well constructed descriptions that are then included in the actual human readable descriptions - Get your products listed and ultimately found when a shopper searches for a precise product that they want to buy.

50 zillion meta descriptions is a lot of work so I would break this into chunks - - you can have them all in your store but do not expect them/you to be found until you actually get around to adding the meta data

My advice is going to be opposite of what you have seen already - I would do several sites - each specializing in a particular area - and then cross-promote each on the others. In these times you need to be an expert in your niche, unless you happen to have a huge staff of experts on each and every one of the products you will carry...

Thank you for your opinions and suggestions, both sides are very pertinent and have equal weight..

I might at this point, go with what yellow suggests and just add a few more items to 'test the water' so to speak.

I may find that I end up doing B if the sales start to outstrip the original shop products..

I'll be happy to report back down the track...

Mike

Mike_Dean,
If you can grasp the implementation of the multi site module, this would allow individual sites but also a single backend to manage versus one to?? admin areas to manage