Yahoo! Small Business is on Twitter

Why We’re There

Almost three weeks ago, Yahoo! Small Business officially entered the Twitterverse. It’s a pretty exciting place to be, and lots of individuals and companies are leveraging its unique simplicity to share information in new ways. Yahoo!, as a company, has been using Twitter to engage with users for some time now, and so when we in Yahoo! Small Business asked ourselves, “Should we be on Twitter?” the answer was a resounding YES. Why, you ask? For the simple reason that thousands and thousands of our customers and partners are already there.

If you’d like to follow us, we’re @YSmallBusiness, and here are just a few of the ways we plan on using Twitter:

• Listening. We want to better understand what excites, frustrates, and drives our customers and what we can do to better serve them.

• Sharing best practices. We’ll be drawing from the successes of our customers, and the expertise of our developers, partners, and employees. Don’t hesitate to let us know what kinds of tips and advice you feel you need.

• Providing updates. We’ll share the latest from Yahoo! Small Business, from product updates to events and conferences.

• And yes, bragging. We want the world to know how incredible our customers are. Yahoo!’s customers are inspiring entrepreneurs who sell important, fascinating, and fun products and services. We can’t wait to share some of their stories.

Unfortunately, Twitter simply cannot do everything. So for customer support inquiries, we’ll continue to direct you to our contact us form for specific questions, and the System Status page for system updates.

What We’ve Learned So Far

Without getting into too much detail, here are four things we’ve learned (or at least have a new appreciation for) after three weeks:

1. Social media conversations are exciting and…different. For years and years, marketers controlled the message and customers listened. Now? We are one voice among many equal voices. We knew this would be the case, but there’s no substitute for experiencing this change directly.

2. Saying things on Twitter is one thing, but getting people to listen is an equally important element of success. It takes thought and planning to build a large and relevant audience.

3. There are some useful tools out there that help you extend the capabilities of Twitter and measure your impact. A few of our favorites so far are TweetDeck, Archivist, MyTweeple, and Twitalyzer. Additional suggestions of Twitter add-ons are always welcome!

4. Don’t just jump in with social media without a plan, but don’t over plan either. Make sure you think before you begin tweeting. Start with thinking about your customers. Are they active in social media? If so, where? Second, think about what you hope to accomplish with social media. As Forrester and others recommend, deciding which technology to use comes after you’ve thought about customer and objective. But don’t wait too long either. You’ll never be able to plan for every scenario that might arise.

So please stay tuned (and follow us!) for more developments on Twitter.

Eric Gilbert
Yahoo! Small Business
Follow @YSmallBusiness on Twitter

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

Yahoo! Small Business Webinar Recordings Now Available

Thank you to everyone who attended our Yahoo! Small Business webinars yesterday, and last Wednesday. We had a great time bringing these to you, and hope you found the sessions informative and enjoyable.

All five of the webinars were recorded and archived, and can now be accessed from our webinars page in online help. So if you had to miss a webinar, or want to review some of the information presented, or would like to share these webinars with someone you know, please visit the webinars page.

For any readers who missed our two days of webinars, here are the topics that were covered:

• Preparing for the Holidays — Opening a Niche Store with Paul Boisvert
  Learn how to create niche stores just in time for the holidays, and other marketing tips to prepare for the busiest time of year.

• E-Commerce Best Practices with Mike Ober
  Learn best practices to make the most of your Yahoo! investment so you can start seeing results right away.

• SEO Tips & Tricks with Rob Snell
  Learn best practices to drive customers to your store through organic search engine optimization.

• LIVE* Site Critiques
  Web site critiques for Yahoo! Store merchants, provided by a panel of experts on branding and conversion for Yahoo! stores.
  * Site critiques were live at time of archived webinar recording

• Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Add-ons & Features Showcase
  Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Developer Partners showcase some of their most useful product features to help make your online business more successful.

Thank you again for making this event a great success.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

October 2009 Release Notes

Early yesterday morning, the team here at Yahoo! Small Business rolled out a few new feature enhancements that we’re happy to let you know about.

First, merchants who use the Simple Promotional Email tool can now include coupon offers targeted for specific items when sending an email to their customers. So, if you’d like to send an email featuring three items (or items from three categories), and wish to include a coupon offer in your email that is specific to those items or item categories only, you can now do so. Or, if you have a coupon offer you wish to extend but don’t want to include certain items from your store in this offer (to avoid discounts on low-margin items, for example), you can do that too. If you choose to include a targeted coupon offer in your email, we recommend ensuring that any items featured in your email are also included in the coupon offer.

Next, there is a new option for your product catalog feeds that are downloaded by shopping comparison engines and other third-party sites, such as Google Product Search. In the Search Engines section of Store Manager, along with the options to enable or disable your product catalog feeds, you now have the option to "enable but do not syndicate" the feed — meaning the product catalog feed is enabled, but will not be readable by shopping comparison engines or other sites. This option is designed for merchants who wish to manage their own product catalog feeds.

Product catalog feed options in the Search Engines section of Store Manager.

You may also notice a change in the Order Settings column of Store Manager. The "Fax/Email" link has been renamed "Email," and the subsequent section of Store Manager now provides a secondary "Email to:" field and delivery settings. Custom email delivery options may be set for each of these fields, including the frequency of the order emails, and the format you wish to receive these in. Merchants who previously used the faxed orders feature may wish to receive orders in PDF format, in place of the faxed copies of orders they used to receive. You can choose to send orders by email to one email address or a set of email addresses in one format (for example, in PDF format, with "Immediately" as the delivery frequency), while also sending order emails to a second email address or set of email addresses with the ability to select a different format and frequency.

New secondary “Email to” field in the Email section of Store Manager.

If you’ve ever received calls or emails from customers who have experienced problems entering gift certificate codes during checkout due to commonly confused letters and numbers being part of code, you may be happy to learn that we’ve changed how gift certificate codes are generated. The character set used when generating gift certificate codes now excludes letters and numbers that are frequently mistaken for similar letters and numbers (for example, 0 and O, 1 and L, 6 and G, and so on). With this change, we’ve aimed to make the checkout experience easier for customers using gift certificates, and to help decrease the number of customer inquiries made to merchants regarding gift certificate codes.

Lastly, one more housekeeping item for merchants using Cross-Sell on product pages to note: Cross-Sell items will now be displayed on product pages for unorderable items. When an item is not available to be ordered, Cross-Sell provides a great opportunity to suggest alternative items that, if aware of, a customer may choose to purchase instead. If you’re a Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant and don’t have Cross-Sell enabled, now’s a great time to start using it as you get ready for the holidays. Read up on optimal cross-selling for the holidays in a previous post to the blog.

We’d be happy to hear your feedback on these enhancements, and encourage you to write in with your comments. As always, we appreciate the opportunity to bring you these enhancements, and hope that these, along with other the features released throughout this year, are helpful in your preparations for the holiday shopping season.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business