Yahoo Store Profits

Less than $450 per year?

Posted by admin under eCommerce Experts

Online Order Processing

Posted by admin under Order Processing

There are a few things to keep in mind about online order processing once you start getting orders through your Yahoo Store.

The Yahoo store platform does not automatically charge customer cards so you need to make sure you do it when your orders ship out. There are ways to set this to automatically charge when an order is placed but I don’t recommend having it set this way. Most customers are not happy when they are charged for items before they are shipped. So instead, be sure to keep up with your order processing.

You also have to be aware of fraudulent orders. They will happen, they happen to everyone. The best thing you can do is block the IP address where the fraudulent orders are coming from. There is not much more you can do but that, I know it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much, but the blocking at least makes it more difficult for the fraudsters to go on with their crap.

Lastly you want to integrate as much as possible, like your shipping. With Yahoo you can set up real-time integration with UPS and USPS. The set up is pretty easy and it will save you time if you’re shipping your own goods. It will allow you to print shipping labels and charge accurate shipping rates for all your products.

These are some of the considerations you need to take into account when processing orders online. I’m happy to answer any questions or go into further detail on any of these points. Leave your questions in the comments below.

Content Creation for Yahoo Stores

Posted by admin under Content Creation

Rob Snell (Yahoo Store Expert) wrote a fantastic article about creating compelling content. Here is a link to the full article: http://www.wilsonweb.com/ecommerce/snell-ecommerce-content.htm

Here are some excerpts from the article that I think will whet your appetite for the full read.

“I’m a retailer, too. I get it. Retailers are busy. Retailers don’t have enough time in the day to take care of customers, shipping, suppliers and employees — and do the routine day-to-day — much less sit around and brainstorm unique product descriptions.

Back in 2004, my baby brother Steve and I changed the way we approached selling online when our growth stopped due to an influx of new competitors. Instead of simply offering products for sale, we took a proactive approach and recommended that customers buy specific products to solve problems in specific situations. Over the next six years this one major change increased our sales an additional $10 million dollars.”

“These are my two guidelines:

1. Best selling products. Start with your best selling products and work your way down the list so your best products get the most attention.
2. Higher ticket items. Write a paragraph of unique text for each $10 in an item’s price, so you create more content for higher ticket items.”

“Creating content is a full-time job, but that doesn’t mean you can’t split it up between multiple people in your company.

If you have an hour a day, that’s 5 hours a week times 50 weeks or 250 hours a year to create content. I tend to write product content in spurts, concentrating on a new product launch for a week or so before the product ships, or focusing on a specific part of an SEO project like getting Title tags written for all the normal products at one time, or seeing which products need customer reviews instead of working on one specific product at a time.”

“All products were not created equal. What’s the difference to your bottom line between a 10% increase in the sales of your best-selling SKU compared to tripling the sales of a normal product in the middle of your list? Focus on your winners. That’s where the real upside is. Chase the hundred dollar bills, not nickels and dimes.

Better performers need more different kinds of content than middle of the road or bottom of the barrel. For most stores I work on, I have three levels of products: top-shelf products, normal products, and backfill datafeed items (slow-selling products that I call “bottom feeders”) — and they all have different content needs.

1. Top shelf products need the full treatment:

• Compelling sales content with a headline + subhead
• Unique product descriptions
• Page summaries (abstract)
• Hand-written SEO elements (Titles, Meta Descriptions, Link Text)
• Custom copywriting fields like Grabbers, Differentiators, Short-name, and Alt-name
• Custom product-based text fields: range, warranty, accessories, etc.
• Multiple product pictures
• Videos demonstrating the product
• Links to manufacturer content
• Customer reviews for that SKU
• “Steve Says” editorial copy
• Buyer’s guide for that product category.
• Comprehensive line review for new product launches

2. Normal products need much less content.

• Unique category and sub category page text
• Unique product NAME (for Title tags),
• Unique product description (usually simply rewriting the manufacturer’s copy works)
• Baked-in SEO elements using our Yahoo! Store templates.

3. Slow-selling products usually have a minimum level of content, even for the lowest products in a data feed.

• Unique text on the subcategory pages for SEO reasons
• Manufacturer’s description (copy and pasted)

Usually this will have to do until the product moves the sales needle enough to get my attention. These products are pretty low in our site’s hierarchy, with little to no PageRank, so they don’t appear in the Google index, and are usually only sold as add-ons to browsers or folks using our internal search tool.”

This is truly an eye-opening article. If you run an online store take the time to read it in full by clicking the above link. Thank you Rob for sharing your insights!

Free Webinar Interview with Chris Malta

Posted by admin under eCommerce Experts

Chris Malta of World Wide Brands recently did a webinar with Brendan Will of Easy Content Blueprints. The webinar is over 2 hours of solid eCommerce content.

It’s free, all you have to do is sign up for the ECB list. Do that here: http://www.easycontentblueprints.com/chris-malta/

Chris is a big proponent of Yahoo Stores, as am I (if you couldn’t already tell from this blog). He spends some time talking about them and the reasons he recommends it for all types of store owners.

Chris also answer questions about drop shipping and wholesaling, market research, vendor relationships and much more.

If you’re selling online or thinking about going into eCommerce this is an interview you want to listen to. Brendan has an entire series of interviews lined up on a variety of topics including more on eCommerce (with me, Audrey Kerwood), social media, traffic generation, and more with top online experts.

Javascript Cross Sell for Yahoo Stores

Posted by admin under Cross Selling

Here is a great post showing you step by step how to add a “You may also like” type of cross sell to your Yahoo Starter store: http://e-commsolution.com/fun-jquery-yahoo-store-part-2/

What’s great about this instruction is that it uses Javascript so you don’t have to mess around with that pesky RTML. This will not auto populate but will make it so you can use the default Accessories area and change the text with JavaScript and not RTML.

Check this out, it’s very simply laid out and will add a nice touch to your store. Even with little experience you shouldn’t have any trouble implementing this on your store. Happy cross selling!

SEO Friendly URLs

Posted by admin under SEO

Here is a great video showing Yahoo Store Owners how to easily create SEO Friendly URLs.

This is useful for those using the database upload to generate lots of pages at once. If you’re adding products one by one, you can simply create your URLs as you add products.

This is important information to know and use. You want your URLs to be both SEO friendly and user friendly and it doesn’t take much effort to get them that way.

Customer Registration for Yahoo Stores

Posted by admin under New Features

Next year Yahoo will be rolling out Customer Registration. It will introduce registration, sign-in, and account features for your store customers, making it easy for customers to register their information and to enjoy a faster, more efficient checkout experience.

This is a fantastic addition Yahoo Store Owners will see big benefits from. Simply adding the ability for customers to check the status of their order is a huge step in terms of automated customer service.

The opt-in will be optional, so customers will not HAVE to register if they don’t want to. They will be able to continue on as a guest. I believe this will require some configuration changes because you don’t want to add another page to your checkout process. Once it is released I’ll work with it and see what can be done to make it easy for customers to use while not breaking up your checkout flow or becoming a distraction.

You can read more about this new feature on the Yahoo Store blog here: http://www.ystoreblog.com/blog/2010/08/introducing-customer-registration/

Yahoo Store Editor Part 2 – Section

Posted by admin under Store Editor

Today we’re going over the Section button in the menu bar of the Yahoo Store Editor. This is the second button in the menu bar once you click on the Store Editor link in your Yahoo Store admin.

The first field is Name. This is the name of your category. This will show up in your navigation bar that customers will see when browsing your site. So be sure to name your section what people are looking for as related to the products that will appear in it. For example, I’m selling maces, crossbows, and flails in my Medieval Weapons category.

If you upload an image into the Image field this will show up at the top of your category page. When I want an image on my category pages I prefer to use the Inset field which I will talk about in just a bit.

Headline is the headline of your category page. I recommend filling this out. It’s important to have headlines on your pages. Your headline can be simple, for my Medieval Weapons pages it’s Replica Medieval Weapons – Maces, Flails, Crossbows, and Spears.

Caption is the field I use for my category page text. You don’t want a lot of text on your pages, you want to let your product images be what dominates the page – images are more appealing and engaging that text – but a short paragraph or two is good idea.

The Icon field should be used if you want to use an image icon in your navigation bar. I personally am not a fan of doing this, I think words are a best and using a icon in conjunction with your text can make your nav bar hard to read.

Inset is the field I mentioned earlier. An image uploaded here will show up next to your caption text and that text will wrap around it. That is why I prefer this to the Image field. To me it looks more professional. You should try both and see which you like better.

You use the Label field if you have your home page specials set to show As Thumbnails. Then this text will show, if not your name text will show.

Need Ship should be set to yes if you products require physical delivery.

Product URL is the URL of your category page. I recommend using the category name as the extension.

Condition is what condition your products are in. Most of the time this will be set to New.

I have added some Custom Properties which I recommend you also do. Mine are Head Tags, Keywords, and Title. These are where I add the Meta information for my category pages. The Head tags section is for the meta description, the others are exactly as they are named.

You go through this process for each of the categories you’re going to add to your store. Once you’ve got those you can start adding your products. That’s we’ll be going over next, the Item button is for adding products.

Yahoo Store Admin Part 1 – Edit

Posted by admin under Store Editor

I’m going to start by walking you through the backend admin of the Yahoo Small Business store manager. Knowing what each function of your store does and controls is important in getting the most out of the platform. I’m going to walk you through step by step starting with the Edit menu.

You use the Store Editor if you’re using the built-in templates that Yahoo provides. Let me just say before I dig in here that I don’t recommend using the built-in templates. They are not very well designed for conversion or SEO and they are built using a programming language called RTML which is not easy to learn or work with.

It is absolutely worth spending the money to have templates created for you. I would get templates made that are based around the Store Tags that Yahoo also offers. That way they will be built in such a way that you can learn to make basic changes yourself or have just about anyone work on them, rather than being limited to only those who know RTML.

That being said I’ll go through how to use the Store Editor for those of you are going to use it. When you click on the Store Editor link you’ll be taken to your home page and there will be a menu bar at the top of the page that looks like this:

To get around in the editor you simply click existing links or to create new pages you click on the corresponding areas in the menu bar. For example, if you want to create a new category you would click on the Section button in the menu bar. If you wanted to edit a category you’ve already created you would click the link to that page and then click the Edit button in the menu bar.

So, since we start on the home page we’ll start with that. Click Edit in the menu bar and you’ll enter the Properties page for that page. I’ll go through each in the order they appear.

Page Title is the Title Tag for your home page. This is a very important field for each page on your site. The Title Tag is the text that appears as the link in the search engine listings. It should be 60 characters or less and be comprised of the main key terms you want your home page to rank for. For example, the title tag for A2 Armory’s home page is Medieval Weapons – Swords, Knight Armor Costumes.

Page Elements controls what elements will be shown on the page. You determine what you want on your pages. Name, Buttons, Image, Final-Text are, in my opinion, the least you want on the page. If you have a specials section or plan to create one you’ll want that in there too. You can change this at any time, so if you leave something out at the start but decide you want to use it later it’s as simple as changing this field to include it.

Image is your store banner.

Image Format is how you want your banner shown – this is based on how you design it. You can choose from Left, Banner, or Unconstrained. If you’re not sure which is best, try them all and see which one looks the way you want it.

Buttons controls the order of the the buttons on your page. The basic setup is Home, Content (your nav), Empty (this is a spacer button to separate your main nav from your info pages), Show-Order, Info, Privacypolicy, Search, Index.

Message is your page content. You can use HTML in this field so adding images, links, forms, etc is perfectly acceptable. It’s also something I recommend – just using text is not the way to best design your home page. Images visually convey what your site is about and are more exciting and engaging then text to visitors.

Specials Format controls how you specials will be shown. You can choose from As-Content or As-Thumbnails.

Contents Elements controls what elements will be displayed on category pages or in the specials section. For example Screen-Text-Title means your product name will be displayed as a link. This is another field to play around with and see what looks the best on your pages.

Contents Format controls how your content will be displayed on your category pages. Vertical is a single column (Image on the top, content below), Ell is two columns (the image on the left, content next to it), Wrap is the same as Ell except if your content is longer than your image it will wrap around so the extra appears below the image.

Columns is the number of columns on your category pages. My preference is 3, but 2 or 4 can work as well. I’m not a fan of single column pages.

Custom Properties are any that you create yourself or a developer creates for you.

After making any changes be sure to click the Update button to save and create your changes.

Part 2 will cover the Section area of the menu bar. If you have any questions please leave them as a comment and I will reply with the answer.

Build Your Yahoo Store – Step By Step

Posted by admin under Yahoo Stores

Hi, I’m Audrey Kerwood co-writer of the original Yahoo Store Profits Step By Step system that was released in 2003. That book is no longer being sold – it was just getting to be too much work to keep it up-to-date since the Yahoo Store Platform started adding new features like every five minutes. But I wanted to get a blog going for Yahoo Stores because I like them and I know a lot of Yahoo Merchant Solutions customers who have questions.

So that’s what this blog is for – I’ll be posting my tips and tricks and I’m here to answer any questions Yahoo Merchant Solutions customers have.

Just so you know who I am, I own and operate A2 Armory – http://www.a2armory.com. If you read the original YSP book or you were part of StomperNet you’re already familiar with the site. If not, go and check it out. It’s a Yahoo Merchant Solutions store. it was started in 2002 on the Yahoo Store legacy platform. I don’t remember when I upgraded to Merchant Solutions, but that’s what it’s running on now.

I’ve been working with the Yahoo platform for over 8 years now and I know it inside and out. So please, ask your questions, I’m happy to help. I’ve been there, I know how hard it can be when you’re learning a new platform – sometimes even the smallest change can take hours to figure out. I can save you time.

So let’s talk. If you know me, you know I’m a friendly and easy-going type of person. If don’t know me, now you do. Tell me what you want to see otherwise you’re going to get whatever I happen to be in the mood to talk about.

Happy building!