Implications of moving E-Commerce provider?

A 1% conversion rate is not uncommon with ecommerce shops, and it is not uncommon for newly launched sites which are merely relying on search engine natural results traffic to have a slow start, since search engines wont index all of your site in one go, they do a little at a time over a period of weeks and months, and pagerank can take months to achieve (although pagerank isn't that important directly). For these reasons, shop owners should either expect slow starts, submit their site early before officially going live, or kick start traffic in other ways at the start, e.g. adwords.

You mentioned in an earlier post that you wanted to move to EKM for a better looking more professional site. Professional looks (as in cosmetics) is one (and a minor one) of many reasons which affect conversion (converting visitors to customers). Other reasons include: competitive prices, products, market, trust (is there a company behind your website, not just an address), professionalism in other ways (no spelling mistakes or bad grammar, check T%C's Yous > You's), calls to action (copyrighting, use of compelling english and images), what your visitors are looking for (check your web/search stats - do you have these? - to see what people are searching for on google to get to your site) etc. Personally I think your site does look professional, apart from the header.

To increase conversions you need to market research your products and prices (can customers get them cheaper elsewhere, e.g. is £104 a good price for a no-brand 1GB video mp3 player when you can get a 4GB Sony walkman video mp3 player on Amazon for £83? - I mention this because the mp3 offer came up as the prominent offer when I visited your home page). Make sure the true compelling bargains are the first things your customers see, don't leave it to chance with some random product selector.

To increase traffic from natural search engine results, to SEO your site, you need to think long and hard about how to structure your categories, products and content. The gift market is a competitive one so you have to be SEO smart in this. Are people searching for a luxury gift for him or are they searching for a luxury gift for a man? Use keyword tools like Overture or Google adwords to help you with this, but don't necessarily target the popular terms that everybody else (including the big players) are targeting, find and target niche areas and products that are not well-served on the search engines, areas where smaller players have more chance of ranking in.

If you decide to move, the off-site SEO (inbound links mainly to your home page) wont be lost as long as you keep with the .com address. The pages that google has already indexed will change if you move, so make sure there is a 404 error handler on the new site during the transition, so that if people click on old site links in google that aren't on your current site, then at least you have a friendly message waiting for them. Eventually the old links in google will be replaced with the new links of your new site.

If you move and use a different .co.uk domain, doing this might cause problems during the transition months because you will have duplicate content, unless you change every description, and you would have to start again building the offsite SEO inbound links.

My advice would be to keep the site and supplier you have, improve the banner graphic, restructure for better seo, take off the random offers on the home page and focus on the real bargains. Rather than wasting your time on a supplier move which might only bring you some cosmetic improvements, invest your time wisely to make your shop and products more attractive to your visitors.

You have to be patient with ecommerce, you should continually be experimenting with your products and website content to improve things, but you shouldn't jump ship to another ecommerce supplier offering a similar system as this wont make much difference (not a jump from easy to ekm, not even a jump from easy to our ecommerce service!). Ecommerce systems are merely tools, it is what you do with those tools that counts.