There was once a mom and pop kind of web shop selling auction products, making money through the affiliate commissions. She (the wife) would do the design and customer contacts, and he (the husband) would do the programming of the site. Mind you, they had no products of their own. The only thing they could do to sell more was thus not to improve the products, but simply improve their site to bring in more people and do more sales.

Their sales, while affording them a small income to live by, were anything from impressive. A couple of dozen people came by each day, only some of them buying. Compared with other web shops they heard of they were a small fish in the sea. The web developer knew about programming, alright, but didn’t feel his code did anything to attract more customers, and that’s what counted, as his wife used to remind him.

(more…)