I have a new client who has several sites selling golf equipment. None of them are performing very well, which is not surprising, as they are basically just ugly-looking shopping carts with no real sales copy.

He has asked me to help him improve his sales. My first instinct is to consolidate all his products into one shopping cart site and use the other domains to host 'mini-sites' linking to this single shopping cart.

Is this the best way to go?

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Are these 4 golf sites all pretty much the same? Or are they serving different niches within golfing?

If they aren't... that's one option- use the existing page rank and incoming links the urls already have and change them into more niched golfing sites. One sites sells two or three high end brands of golf clubs, one selling a few cheap brands, the others selling golf clothes & shoes... etc.

I'm not sure what the SEO ramifications are of having a "shopping cart site", and having the other sites linking to it... as opposed to having carts on each website. I'd be interested to know that myself. Anyone got any SEO perspective on this?

What you do depends on where the traffic comes from.

If it's from long tail PPC, ideally you want them to go to a site specific to that long tail key phrase, hopefully with a dynamic headline that includes the key phrase.

If it's generic golf keywords, it's no surprise that it is performing poorly.

Your landing pages must be tailored to your traffic. It's that simple.

I highly recommend the annual Marketing Sherpa Landing Page Handbook. If you market online, it is well worth the $497. It explains all this in detail.

[SherpaStore] Practical Marketing Case Studies, Benchmarks, How-to Handbooks, Buyer's Guides, and Metrics for B2B, or B2C

I would think that one could create dozens of golf sites, offering similar (if not the same equipment) and tweak the sales copy of each site so that it most parallel's a key-word phrase that someone would be searching for.

No need to put all those sites under one domain with 1shoppingcart.com

Those sites can be located anywhere under their own domains, and 1shoppingcart.com will automatically "connect" them.