Access Manager, Order and Payment APIs General Release, and Checkout Enhancements
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Friday, August 28th, 2009
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
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