Today's Yahoo! Store Blog post comes from Scott Smigler, president of Exclusive Concepts, Inc., a Yahoo! Small Business partner that helps online retailers to increase revenue, get smarter, and do more with less. Services include advanced search engine optimization, profitable PPC marketing, scientific conversion testing, and optimized lifecycle email marketing. Exclusive Concepts is also a Patron Sponsor of the Merchant Summit. Scott will be speaking on several topics at the Summit, including preparations for the holiday shopping season.

When you grew up in bricks-and-mortar retail as I did, you learn to live for the holiday season. It's a magical time when many retailers go from "being in the red," to "being in the black." For many merchants it also means long hours, big bank deposits, sore backs, and future sentimentalities that can only be appreciated by those who have experienced it directly [...]

If your store pages are currently tagged with Yahoo! Search Marketing conversion tags, there are a couple of important points you should know about the adCenter transition.

YSM Conversion Tracking Reports

Once you've transitioned your YSM account to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter, if you choose, you may still track Yahoo! Search Marketing conversions in adCenter by selecting the opt-in option approving Yahoo! to copy conversion data into adCenter. This reporting will remain in place for 9-12 months following the transition. After this 9-12 month time period, you must replace your Yahoo! Search Marketing conversion tags with Microsoft Advertising adCenter tags. Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store customers may also choose to track these conversions using Yahoo! Web Analytics [...]

On Wednesday, September 1 (that's tomorrow), from 1-2 p.m. EDT / 10-11 a.m. PDT, join 1 Choice 4 Your Store as they walk you through the five steps to opening a new Yahoo! store for business.

Sign up for the webinar.

Mike and Shawna will be discussing the features released earlier this month, how they can benefit your store, and best practices for Customer Registration on your Yahoo! store. The two will also be answering your specific questions. Submit your site for a live review or ask your Customer Registration, or other ecommerce-related question at EcomQuestion.

The specially-negotiated Summit hotel room rate with the Marriott Santa Clara ends tomorrow, Friday, August 27. To learn more about the Summit and to see the latest agenda and speaker line-up, please see the Summit web site. Click on the "Travel Details" tab for details on how to lock in your hotel room before this special rate offer ends.

If you've signed into your Store Manager since Tuesday morning, you may have noticed that Checkout Manager is now called Checkout & Registration Manager, and that a beta label appears beside this link. The beta label applies to the registration feature only, and not to your checkout pages or the sections of Checkout & Registration Manager that existed prior to this release. We've released Customer Registration in beta because during this phase, we've introduced mainly buyer-facing features, and not the full feature set. The general release, which will include a merchant feature set, is currently set for early 2011 [...]

If you have asked one or more of these questions over the past three months, this webinar may be of interest to you:

• Why did Google make this change?
• What exactly is Google Mayday and Caffeine?
• How have other businesses been affected by it?
• What does this mean for you?
• What should you do in the short and long term?

Sign up for the webinar.

In my opinion, the business question for non-brand name merchants is this. How much time should you invest in mobile today?

I recently had a Twitter conversation on the topic of mobile commerce (read the history) with @AllWebPromotion, a member of the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer network. We agreed that for now, the time investment to do mobile commerce properly, for non-brand name merchants, may be [...]

Hear what they had to say during an interview with WBEV-AM in Milwaukee.