First, an important note for all merchants: Upon your first visit to Checkout & Registration Manager following this release, your Publish Order Settings link in Store Manager will become active. If you have not made changes in Checkout & Registration Manager, you do not need to publish your order settings [...]

New Site Search (Beta Release)

Our new Site Search beta offers a number of features designed for better merchandising on your search results page and an improved search experience for your customers. When you enable the new Site Search beta for your store, customers can [...]

Page Redirect Manager is designed to assist you with your search engine optimization (SEO) and site management efforts. A 301 redirect (also known as a "permanent redirect") can be used to help retain a site page's existing search engine ranking when the URL of the page changes, in addition to redirecting your site traffic.

For example, you may have a product page on your site that already ranks well in search results, but you've decided to rename the page to incorporate keywords as part of your SEO efforts. Or perhaps the page for a discontinued product ranks highly in search results, and you'd like to direct search engines and site traffic to a page for a similar product you carry. Maybe you have a site hosted outside of Yahoo! with pages that receive significant traffic and rank well with search engines, and you'd like to move that site onto the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions platform but retain the [...]

Merchants who wish to improve the probability of having their products featured in Google Product Search are encouraged to review Google’s changes and the updates we released to Catalog Manager this morning that are intended to help make these changes easier for merchants to implement [...]

In order to use Saved Cards, our Customer Registration system must be enabled for your store.

Note: If you have not published your Order Settings since the end of June, you may see an active Publish Order Settings link in Store Manager due to work performed in order to release Saved Cards. Unless you are enabling Saved Cards or have made your own updates, no changes requiring an Order Settings publish have been made [...]

Saved Cards for Customer Registration (July 2011)

During the first half of July, we plan to release a Saved Cards feature for our Customer Registration system. Saved Cards will allow your registered customers to store credit and debit card information within their customer profile, with a goal of providing a more efficient checkout process when they shop from your store. When Saved Cards is enabled, registered customers may add, edit, and delete cards from their profile at any time, and will be given the option to save new card information after placing an order with your store [...]

Next time you're in your Store Manager, I encourage you to click on the "Catalog Manager" link and have a look around at what's new. The updates we've made are as a result of the feedback we've heard from you, our merchants. Many of the enhancements and new options come from the requests and suggestions you've had for features that will make daily tasks such as locating, filtering, and updating products faster for you to do, and can make managing your product catalog easier and more efficient.

Here's a look at what's new in Catalog Manager [...]

The Social Media Sharing feature is available for all merchants using Editor 3.0 templates, and can be installed by running the Design Wizard, or by using the Store Editor Variables page and adding CSS to your store's css-edits file. If you're using custom templates, you can install this feature by inserting a new RTML operator into your store templates, and adding CSS [...]

Those of you who have enabled Customer Registration since its release already know its benefits. With its current feature set, Customer Registration offers your customers a faster, more streamlined checkout process, since their registered shipping and billing address information is pre-populated on your store's checkout pages. The "reorder" feature lets customers who place repeat orders duplicate a past order by adding all of the order items to their cart again in just one click. Customer Registration also offers your customers the ability to easily check on the status of their orders, eliminating the need to inquire with you directly. This, in turn, can reduce the saves you valuable time fielding those "Where is my order?" calls.

These are just a couple of the key benefits many of you are already familiar with. Early yesterday morning, we added a few more. Now when you sign into your Store Manager, you'll see a new "Customer Manager" link, located in the Process column. Clicking on this link gives you access to all the valuable registered customer and order data you've collected since turning on Customer Registration. Using Customer Manager, you can dig deep into this treasure trove of data, to gain insights that can help you improve the way you do business [...]

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 [...]