Access Manager, Order and Payment APIs General Release, and Checkout Enhancements

Earlier this week, we here at Yahoo! Small Business released a few new features and enhancements that you may have noticed if you’ve logged into your Business Control Panel or Store Manager over the last couple of days.

Access Manager

With the launch of the Access Manager, we’ve introduced some big improvements to the way you allow others to access your store tools and features. Now you have even more options for the types of access you grant to others, so you can make sure your developers, order processors, and anyone else working on your store have only the access you want. With the new administrator role, for example, you can provide a user with access to both your Store Control Panel and your Web Hosting Control Panel. Other new roles are more focused to specific sections of your account. A store editor can work only with your site building tools, but won’t see your site statistics or Yahoo! Web Analytics reports (if enabled), while a store analyst can review your statistics and analytics, but can’t modify your store pages or catalog. See all Access Manager roles.

Our release of Access Manager does not change any access you currently have assigned to other users. More information and answers to some key Access Manager questions are available in online help. To start using Access Manager, click the "Access Manager" link in your Business Control Panel, or click the "Access" link in the Site Settings section of your Store Manager.

Order and Payment APIs General Release

Order and Payment APIs are now available to all Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store merchants. These APIs were first released in beta in October 2007. Designed to make order management more efficient, the APIs can be used to maintain synchronous communication between 3rd-party order management systems and your Yahoo! store, ensuring that order information is current in both systems. Order and Payment APIs also provide batch-processing capabilities, which allow actions on multiple orders at the same time, rather than on a per-order basis.

If you’re a Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant who didn’t already have Real-Time Links enabled for your store, you’ll now see the "Real-Time Links" link in the Order Processing column of your Store Manager. Your API Settings tool, which allows you to grant API access to partners and manage partner tokens, is located here, and looks like this:

API calls can only be made by authorized partners who have been granted API access for your store, which requires a Partner ID. Merchants do not need to apply for a partner ID on behalf of partners. If you’re a merchant, you will only need to apply for a Partner ID if you wish to make API calls yourself. To obtain a Partner ID, please complete our Application for Partner Access. To learn more about these APIs and how to use the API Settings tool, please visit our help section.

Please note: Support from Yahoo! is available for difficulties or errors when adding partners to your store’s API access list, or for problems encountered when renewing or revoking tokens. Yahoo! does not assist merchants or partners with troubleshooting 3rd-party applications being integrated with API calls. If you are a merchant who wishes to use Order and Payment APIs and cannot set up your own API calls, we recommend consulting the API documentation or contacting a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Developer Network partner familiar with the APIs.

Checkout Enhancements

Back in May, we made an enhancement to the Foreign Orders section of Store Manager that allows you to limit which states a buyer can select when providing shipping information during checkout. Until now, choosing to limit the states that your store ships to also limited the states a buyer could select when entering billing information. Recognizing the need to limit states for shipping but not billing (for example, if a buyer is in a state that orders are not shipped to, but wishes to ship an order to a state that your store will ship to), we’ve added a new option to the Foreign Orders page. If you’re using the "US-Only select states" or "US-Only select states and Canada" option, and don’t wish to apply these same state limitations to billing, enable the new "Do not limit allowed Billing Address states" checkbox.

We’ve also made a change to how stored cart information is handled when a tax rate, shipping rate, or item price is changed after a customer exits the checkout process. Now when one of these is changed after a customer leaves checkout without completing their order, the new cost will be reflected on the billing information page should the customer return to complete the checkout process.

As always, we appreciate the opportunity to bring you new features and enhancements, and would be happy to hear your feedback.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Free Webinar Weekend: How to Bring New Life to Your Website

Beginning Friday, August 21, through Sunday, August 23, 1 Choice 4 Your Store will be hosting New Life Event, a webinar weekend consisting of 20 free, live webinars that explore ways to bring new life to your website. Be sure to catch tomorrow night’s webinar event, "Back to Basics: E-Commerce Best Practices," with Mike Ober from Yahoo! Small Business. Mike’s webinar begins at 6 p.m. EDT, and will show you how to take a step back for an objective look at your website, to ensure that you’re following the basic principles of ecommerce while reinforcing best practices.

New Life Event webinars will cover search marketing, SEO, analytics, online marketing, social media, and other topics. The full schedule is available on the New Life Event website.

Register for New Life Event now.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

OneTwoPunch Live Site Review Webinar

Don’t miss your chance for a live site review, during the next OneTwoPunch webinar. On Wednesday, August 26, 2009, from 2-3 p.m. EDT, join Scott Smigler (Exclusive Concepts), Eric Yonge (EYStudios), and Mike Ober (Yahoo! Merchant Solutions) for the next round of free, live site reviews.

Scott, Eric, and Mike will review as many sites as they can during this hour, and provide insights on overall site design, search engine optimization, and conversion marketing techniques. Their goal is to help you improve your brand, improve your rankings, and improve the rate at which your site converts shoppers into buyers.

Register for this free webinar. Remember to indicate if you would like your site to be reviewed, and to provide your site URL.

Increase Your Store’s Visibility on TheFind

Today’s Y! Store Blog article is a guest post from Jordan Keffer of TheFind, a shopping search engine. If you’re a Yahoo! Store merchant, you may have noticed referral traffic coming to your store from TheFind. With holiday shopping season fast approaching, you may be interested in increasing your visibility on this site, through adding and verifying store information, building your store profile, and taking part in programs designed to help boost conversion rates.

Greetings from TheFind! Our shopping search engine currently attracts over 13 million shoppers every month, and has sent traffic to over 100,000 unique retailers just in the last 30 days. TheFind is built upon a philosophy of being the most comprehensive shopping destination online.

To help achieve that goal, we recently launched a new merchant center for every merchant, large or small, who would like greater visibility and relevance within TheFind’s search results. Simply log in to claim your store and submit your key information – including payment and shipping options, Twitter and blog URLs, customer service links and more – so that we can share it with our shoppers, and help increase your store’s relevance and conversion rates. Also, be sure to join your peers in our new UpFront Program, which gives you an added boost of visibility and transparency.

For a limited time, we’re waiving the annual UpFront service fee for Yahoo! Stores. Be sure to join before the critical Holiday shopping season.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create an account in our new merchant center.
2. Tell us more about your store by filling out the profile questions. This information will appear on our site with your product listings.
3. Verify your store by placing the code of the button, badge or link that you would like to display on your home page and then clicking on “Verify.” Shoppers will be able to click on the UpFront badge on your site and see a pop-up with the same information that appears on TheFind.
4. That’s it! As long as you leave the UpFront badge up on your site, you’re a member of the program and you’ll receive all of the benefits that come with it, including increased visibility on our site.

If you can’t place the UpFront badge or text link on your home page right now, we recommend that you still log in and tell us more about your site. The more information we have about your store, the more relevant your results will be in our search algorithm, and the easier it will be for you to connect with the millions of shoppers who visit our site every month.

You can stay up-to-date on the latest from TheFind’s UpFront Program and Merchant Center on Twitter. We follow back!

Jordan Keffer, TheFind
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business