Yahoo! Store Merchants and Developers Team Up for Haiti Relief Fund

This is the kind of news we really like to share. If you’ve been thinking of how you can help support Haiti relief efforts, you’re not alone. As of the time of this blog post, 13 Yahoo! store merchants and developer partners have come together to raise money with a week of offers that benefit Haiti disaster relief funds.

During the week of February 1-5, the following Yahoo! stores will donate a percentage of every sale to charities including the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Vision:

• All Things Jeep
• Brides’ Village
• Bright and Bold
• Calypso Parrot
• Classic Charms
• Nature Chest
• Shop the Gift Basket Store
• Shower-Curtains.com
• Titanium-Buzz

The following Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer partners are also playing a key role in this week of fundraising, either through donating their services to help with this event, or by donating portions of their own sales:

• ET Productions
• Exclusive Concepts
• EYStudios
• Your Store Wizards

Kudos to these merchants and developers for coming together to support relief efforts for Haiti. To learn more about what each store and developer is doing, visit the event’s information page.

If you’re a Yahoo! store or a developer partner also donating percentages of sales to Haiti relief, please let us and Yahoo! Store blog readers know by leaving a comment. Please note: in order to be posted, your comment must include a link to an information page on your site that outlines what your business is doing to help the relief efforts.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Shopping Engines Success for Yahoo! Stores Webinar With Special Guest Rob Snell

On Wednesday, January 27, from 10-11 a.m. PST, join SingleFeed and special guest Rob Snell (author of Yahoo! Store for Dummies and frequent Yahoo! Store Blog guest blogger) as they host a free webinar that looks at getting started with shopping engines, employing best practices for success, and learning to streamline the process.

During this webinar, SingleFeed and Rob Snell will look at:

• Why retailers partner with shopping engines
• How to list your products
• Tips for optimizing your product feed
• A real customer success story

Register for the webinar.

January 2010 Release Notes

Earlier today, we rolled out our first release of the new year. While today’s release contained a number of feature enhancements that we’d like to call your attention to, we’re happy to tell you that bringing you customer registration features in 2010 has been one of our top development priorities over the last several months.

Next time you log in to your Store Manager, you may notice some or all of the following:

Alternate shipping credit option in Coupon Manager

At times, orders for which free shipping coupons are redeemed may not qualify for free shipping. For example, the free shipping method included in a coupon offer may not be available for the location a customer wishes to ship their order to – such as orders being shipped internationally, or to locations outside of the contiguous United States – or a customer may wish to use a shipping method not included in the offer to receive their order at an earlier date.

Now, you may include an alternate shipping credit with free shipping coupon offers, which deducts a specified dollar amount from an order’s subtotal when free shipping cannot be applied. By offering your customers a credit towards shipping when free shipping cannot be used, you may save orders that would otherwise have been abandoned.

Choose to include an alternate shipping credit with free shipping coupon offers.

Select Store Owner tool (Yahoo! Store accounts with multiple administrators)

With the release of our Access Manager tool last August, stores must have a single user designated as the store owner. Some Yahoo! Store accounts have multiple administrators with the same level of access, and a single store owner cannot easily be identified to be assigned the owner access role. If you have administrator access to one of these accounts, you will soon receive an email notifying you that a store owner must be selected, and you will be directed to use the Select Store Owner tool via the "Access" link in Store Manager. A notice regarding this will also appear in Store Manager.

Once an owner has been selected, all users with administrator access for that store will be notified of the owner selection via email. The email notification will include both the Yahoo! ID of the store owner, and the Yahoo! ID of the user who made the owner selection.

All Yahoo! Store accounts must have a single user designated as the store owner.

Ability to add multiple URLs for real-time order posts

If you’re using multiple services or applications that you wish to make real-time order posts to, you’ll be happy to know that the Real-Time Link Settings page in Store Manager now allows you to add up to five real-time order post URLs. If there’s a service you haven’t been using because it required an additional real-time order post URL, you can now go ahead and add a URL for that service. Or, if you’ve been using a relay service in order to use multiple services, you can now stop the relay service. This has a potential PCI compliance benefit to you, as data will only be relayed by Yahoo!, without having to go through the extra step of a relay service. The format of the order posts may be specified for each individual URL you enter (Yahoo! Format, ECML, XML, or OBI).

Doctype added to v2 Editor pages

While v3 Editor displays a doctype for Editor pages, v2 Editor previously did not. To allow for better ease of store development, a doctype has been added to v2 Editor pages, and is customizable upon request. If you or your developer wish to set a custom doctype, please contact us.

Validation of merchant-input HTML in Checkout Manager

At times, you may enter your own HTML into various regions in Checkout Manager. However, if a cart is secure or a buyer is within the checkout flow, any references to insecure (http) links rather than secure (https) links will cause a customer’s browser to display a warning that the page is not secure, which can negatively impact conversion. To help prevent this from happening, Checkout Manager will now validate merchant-input HTML for references to insecure (http) links, and display a warning message if these references are found.

Yahoo! Web Analytics product view tracking enhancement

Previously, page views of items set as not orderable were not tracked by Yahoo! Web Analytics. As many non-orderable items are items that are temporarily out of stock, but are still useful to track, we’ve made an enhancement that allows tracking of page views for any item with a value entered in the Price field, even if the item is not orderable. If an item does not have a price, a value of 0 must be entered in order for the page view of the item to be recorded. Learn more.

We appreciate the opportunity to bring you these enhancements, and look forward to bringing you new features this year. Should you have any questions about the enhancements released today, please consult our online help center, or contact us.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Is Your Store Ready for the New Year?

With the 2009 holiday shopping season having come to a close, it’s a good time to take stock of how your store performed, to update any outdated content still lingering from last year, and to learn from what worked and what could be improved to get your store and promotions in top shape for 2010.

Out with the old, in with the new

First, make sure your store is ready for the new year. As Yahoo! Merchant Solutions’ Mike Ober recently tweeted, be sure to update your copyright information (change 2009 to 2010), and remove any holiday messaging and promotions that are no longer relevant. A store with an outdated copyright year, messaging, and promotions may cause customers to question if your store is still doing business, your business’ attention to detail, and can raise doubts about how long an order may take to process and ship if the store itself isn’t up-to-date. It’s also a good time to review your About Us page. As a page that can play a key role in building trust and increasing conversions, it’s important to make sure all information and any links on this page are current.

If you’re using search campaigns, make sure any messaging specific to the holidays has been updated. For Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store Merchants using Yahoo! Web Analytics, data collected over the holiday shopping season can be used to optimize marketing campaigns for the new year and shopping days leading up to Valentine’s Day. (See the Yahoo! Web Analytics section of this post for some suggested reports to look at.)

Customers like free shipping

Never forget the power of free shipping. According to comScore, free shipping was one of the "clear winners" of the 2009 holiday shopping season. If you’d like to offer free shipping as a Valentine’s Day promotion, but aren’t sure how to set this up, our online help page explains the ways in which you can offer free shipping for orders from your store. If you’d like to offer free shipping to a select group of customers only, remember that you can create single-use coupons good for free shipping, and can also require a minimum purchase amount to qualify for a free shipping offer.

Coupons for free shipping can be created using Coupon Manager.

Review your analytics reports

If you are a Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant using Yahoo! Web Analytics, now is a good time to review your reports. While the key performance indicators you’re most interested in may vary by store, some good places to start are a review of your checkout performance (requires prior setup of a checkout scenario analysis), page bounce rates, conversion ratio by search phrases, top internal searches, visitor navigation paths and paths for conversion, and your campaign reports (requires prior setup of campaign tracking). You may also want to dive into your demographics reports to learn where your potential customers are coming from, along with their age range and gender, so you can better optimize your store promotions and your marketing campaigns.

If you’re not yet using Yahoo! Web Analytics, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – turn it on. Yahoo! Web Analytics is included in your Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store plan, and by leaving it disabled, you’re missing out on incredible amounts of valuable data that can help you improve sales. If you’re new to Yahoo! Web Analytics, or would like to review some of the data available to you, be sure to check out MarketMotive’s free 30-minute video showing you "4 Quick Ways to Improve Your Store" using information from your analytics reports. If you’re already familiar with Yahoo! Web Analytics and are looking for ways to dig deeper into your data, you may wish to watch Dennis Mortensen’s archived webinar session that focused on using a revenue participation metric for content optimization, and how to use metric alerts for insights into search phrase opportunities.

Use demographics reports to optimize store promotions and marketing campaigns.

Make the most of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

If you’re a Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant using Cross-Sell, and you have merchant-created (manual) cross-sell rules in place, take a moment to review your current cross-sell rules. Are they up-to-date and inclusive of new products in your store? And, are you using auto-suggest? As we’ve mentioned in a previous post to the blog, on average, auto-suggested cross-sells drive 30% higher revenue per order than cross-sell rules created manually by merchants.

Review your merchant-created cross-sell rules, and consider using auto-suggest.

A couple of good reads to begin the new year

• January is the start of a new year, but it may also come with a higher volume of returned merchandise following the holiday shopping season. While returns aren’t the happiest way to begin 2010, your return policy provides a great opportunity to impress customers and earn their business in the future. This article from Forbes.com looks at how Zappos uses free, no-hassle returns to their advantage, and integrates feedback about returned merchandise to improve their web site content and reduce returns.

• If you’re concerned about Google ringing in the new year with changes to their search results and what it means for your search ranking, you may be interested in articles from SEOmoz and TechCrunch about the search changes. (The basic summary? Don’t panic.)

On behalf of the Yahoo! Small Business team, thank you for continuing to allow us the opportunity to be a partner in your store’s success, and happy new year.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business