I would recommend using dedicated landing pages that focus on each type of item one by one and avoid cross promoting products on these pages until the potential customer has made a choice and added to cart, then during the checkout process you can experiment similar to what Amazon.com does – “people who bought the item you selected also purchased X,Y,Z (list a few more related products here). I know that it’s more work, but doing this usually increases sales since your conversion rates tend to go up as you are giving people exactly what they want without bombarding them with too many options. You can start with the items the either provide you with the highest profit margins or largest sales volumes to test and then expand down from there.

If you’re talking about your home page, I would organize the items by the categories that make the most sense for your customers – Ie. how are your customers searching? Is it by item type, application or room? And then direct traffic to the above mentioned category or item specific landing pages.

It’s difficult to visualize without seeing other examples so I recommend checking out other similar sites (competitors) as well as sites from other industries for inspiration. I also recommend having a look at Steve Krug’s book – Don’t Make Me Think. Steve give a lot of great examples and shares insights on what works and doesn’t on websites and landing pages.

Also take a look at Jakob Neilsen’s books on web usability, they’re full of great visual examples of both good and bad websites and elements.

And last but not least, don’t forget to keep an eye on your web analytics to monitor the effects that these changes have and so that you can see what works and what doesn’t and make adjustments.

Keep me posted on how things go, I’d love to hear your experience with giving fewer choices to get more action.

Here's a product I built two different landing pages for. One a typical *ugly* – I mean reeally ugly – sales letter and the other is the same text only this time I used a beautiful wordpress template.

(should I share the urls?? what the heck…) <– me thinkin to myself

Here's the ugly one:
http://tamingthegreenbug.com/

Here's the cute one:
http://tamingthegreenbug.com/BuyBook/

Which one do you think converts better? Reply to this comment and tell me what you think converts better and why…

(There are two main reasons why one converts better. I'll give candy to whoever gets them right or maybe ice cream… :)

Thanks for sharing your experience – no one can argue with hard factual data!

It's especially good to have when faced with those that like to “go with their gut”.

Sometime you almost have to close your eyes and pick something without looking back to keep your sanity. :)

You raise an interesting point where advertisers should better segment their audience before inundating them with all the possible options in hope that they'll be interested in one of them.

Takes a bit of initial effort, but the value of this strategy will pay off. I'm with you, the lobster trap approach makes so much more sense!

I never had a problem when I was little; it was KitKat, Smarties, Caramilk or Hershey's.