Live Site Reviews During the Next OneTwoPunch Webinar

The live site review panel at the recent Yahoo! Merchant Summit was a big hit with merchants. Scott Smigler (Exclusive Concepts), Eric Yonge (EYStudios), and several other expert panelists reviewed merchant websites and offered critiques on branding, search engine optimization, and conversion optimization during a panel moderated by Paul Boisvert, Lead Product Manager of Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.

Now, the fun and learning continue, this time in the form of a free, live webinar that you can participate in from the comfort of your office. On July 29, from 2-3 p.m. EDT, join Scott, Eric, Paul, and Mike Ober (Senior Manager, Merchant Development for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions) for one more hour of expert site reviews. The dynamic foursome will review as many sites as they can during this hour.

Sign-up for the webinar here. Be sure to submit your website, so that you can take advantage of a live site review.

July 2009 Release Notes

Here at Yahoo! Small Business, we’ve been busy making a number of system upgrades to improve your store’s performance, and to help with future feature additions and enhancements. Here are some notes about what we rolled out this week.

First, we’ve made some improvements to our order and basket servers, which will help with handling order load, and increase capacity. Making these enhancements well in advance of holiday shopping season ensures we can monitor our systems to make sure the changes are solid, and tune performance if needed, long before your store’s holiday sales begin to ramp up.

Second, in addition to order and basket server improvements, we’ve made some software upgrades. These changes were also implemented to ensure system performance, and to support features we’ll be building in the future.

Along with these changes, you may notice a new “Address Line 1” field in the Shipping & Tax Test tool, used for calculating shipping rates when using official UPS methods. Since UPS rates can vary depending on whether the destination address is a commercial or residential address, entering an accurate street address into the “Address Line 1” field will determine which rates are used to calculate shipping costs. If this field is left blank, or if an inaccurate address is entered into this field, the rates shown when performing a shipping and tax test may be different from the rates shown in checkout.

Address Line 1 field in the Shipping & Tax Test tool

With these system improvements in place, we look forward to bringing you more new features and enhancements over the coming months. Be sure to stay tuned to the blog for what’s to come.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business