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shopping season having come to a close, it’s a good time to take stock of how your store performed, to update any outdated content still lingering from last year, and to learn from what worked and what could be improved to get your store and promotions in top shape for 2010.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 A store with an outdated copyright year, messaging, and promotions may cause customers to question if your store is still doing business, your business’ attention to detail, and can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

Actionable Holiday Insights on the Next OneTwoPunch Webinar

Want valuable tips and advice from a Top 500 Internet Retailer and Yahoo! Store merchant? Then be sure to check out the next OneTwoPunch webinar, on Wednesday, December 9, 2009, at 2 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. CT / 11 a.m. PT.

The OneTwoPunch will be joined by special guest Au-Co Mai, founder of Emitations.com. Au-Co started Emitations.com 10 years ago on the Yahoo! Store platform. Now, it’s ranked #14 in the jewelry category of the Top 500 Internet Retailers, and #1 in costume jewelry. Au-Co will share her story and provide advice to merchants about what they can do to maximize sales in the final weeks of the holiday season.

In addition, Eric Yonge (EY Studios) and Scott Smigler (Exclusive Concepts) will offer site critiques specifically geared towards site improvements that can be made to throttle sales in the last few weeks leading up to the holidays.

Sign up for the webinar.

Ecommerce Tips on eCom Experts Radio

Be sure to catch this week’s eCom Experts radio broadcast, tonight at 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT on WebmasterRadio.FM. Mike Ober (Senior Manager, Merchant Development for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions) will be joining Shawna Fennell (1 Choice 4 Your Store) to discuss ecommerce tips and best practices.

If you miss tonight’s broadcast, this episode will be archived and made available on the eCom Experts web site.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

RTML Problems? Missing Expressions May be the Cause

Today’s Y! Store Blog post comes from Adam Davis, a technical account manager with our customer care team here at Yahoo! Small Business. Below, he shares some of his RTML knowledge to help Yahoo! Store merchants troubleshoot a common issue encountered when building custom RTML templates. Merchants are reminded that Yahoo! Small Business does not offer support for custom templates or RTML customization. The post is recommended for merchants with some understanding of and experience with RTML.

A popular method of building templates in RTML involves using a text field filled with HTML, then placing words inside these HTML tags that are unique enough to be used as an identifier or "token."

Below is an example of an RTML field that contains HTML, which I’ve taken from my own store. In my store variables, I have a med-text field named "site-html." It contains the following HTML:

<div id="main">
<div id="top-nav"> @@TOP-NAVIGATION@@ </div>
<div id="body">
<p>@@CAPTION@@</p>
</div>
<div id="left-nav"> @@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@ </div>
</div>

In my templates, I call my variable site-html. I use TOKENS to iterate over each piece of the HTML, then execute something where there is a match for my SWITCH keys.

<RTML>
     WITH= variable site-html
             value @site-html
         FOR-EACH var html
                 sequence TOKENS site-html
             SWITCH html
Key          "@@TOP-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "top"
Key          "@@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "left"
Key          html
expression       TEXT html
</RTML>

There is a major pitfall when working with this type of template because SWITCH is evaluated from top to bottom, interpreted as alternating key-expression pairs. When a switch expression is evaluated, its value is matched against the keys, the corresponding expression is evaluated, and its value is returned.

When using TOKENS to go over a large block of data, you need to be very careful with the construction of your SWITCH. The most common cause of trouble with a SWITCH is a missing expression.

Taking the above example and adding a new key with no expression will continue to work in Store Editor. However, it will also cause a large number of errors that may result in being unable to publish the site.

<RTML>
     WITH= variable site-html
             value @site-html
         FOR-EACH var html
                 sequence TOKENS site-html
             SWITCH html
Key          "@@TOP-NAVIGATION@@"
Expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "top"
Key          "@@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "left"
Key          "@@CAPTION@@"
expression       html
Key          TEXT html
</RTML>

This RTML will outwardly work the same as the first example, but there will be an extra overhead for the template due to the missing expression.

It will evaluate something like this:

no case for:"<div"
no case for:"id=\"main\">"
no case for:"<div"
no case for:"id=\"top-nav\">"
@@TOP-NAV@@ <– will evaluate successfully and call the navigation template.
no case for:"</div>"
no case for:"<div"
no case for:"id=\"body\">"
no case for:"<p>"
@@CAPTION@@ <– will do nothing because when this is called it is in an unactionable context ie: html = "@@CAPTION@@" which does nothing.
no case for:"</p>"
no case for:"</div>"
no case for:"<div"
no case for:"id=\"left-nav\">"
@@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@ <– will evaluate successfully and call the navigation template.
no case for:"</div>"
no case for:"</div>"

As you can see, there are 14 extra lines of overhead from a very simple piece of HTML.

Now you may ask, "Mr. Yahoo, I would like to build out my all my SWITCH Keys, but they do not yet have an expression to evaluate. What do I do?"

The answer is, use "nil,” as in the example below:

<RTML>
     WITH= variable site-html
             value @site-html
         FOR-EACH var html
                 sequence TOKENS site-html
             SWITCH html
Key          "@@TOP-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "top"
Key          "@@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "left"
Key          "@@CAPTION@@"
expression       nil
Key          html
expression       TEXT html
</RTML>

With one more line of RTML, every SWITCH key now has an expression to evaluate, and no errors are returned.

The second situation that can cause a very difficult problem to troubleshoot, yet is easy to see, is a missing expression in the middle of the SWITCH causing garbled output.

<RTML>
     WITH= variable site-html
             value @site-html
         FOR-EACH var html
                 sequence TOKENS site-html
             SWITCH html
Key          "@@TOP-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "top"
Key          "@@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       "@@CAPTION@@"
Key          TEXT @caption
expression       html
Key          TEXT html
</RTML>

This will result in @@TOP-NAVIGATION@@ being evaluated correctly, however every space/tab/ (and in this case @@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@) in the HTML will be replaced with a copy of the caption.

In this example my caption is TEXT " This is my caption " and my top navigation is TEXT "*  top navigation bar  *".

–HTML output–
<div This is my caption id="main"> This is my caption
<div This is my caption id="top-nav">* top navigation bar * This is my caption </div>
This is my caption <div This is my caption id="body"
This is my caption <p>@@CAPTION@@</p>
This is my caption </div>
This is my caption <div This is my caption id="left-nav"> This is my caption </div> This is my caption
</div>
–end–

The fix for this issue? Like with the first example, make sure that all of your SWITCH keys have an expression.

<RTML>
     WITH= variable site-html
             value @site-html
         FOR-EACH var html
                 sequence TOKENS site-html
             SWITCH html
Key          "@@TOP-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "top"
Key          "@@LEFT-NAVIGATION@@"
expression       CALL :NAVIGATION
                 "left"
Key          "@@CAPTION@@"
expression       TEXT @caption
Key          html
expression       TEXT html
</RTML>

I hope these examples assist you with troubleshooting some of your RTML customizations. If you’re not comfortable working with RTML, but wish to customize your store, check out our Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Developer Network for developers who specialize in working with Yahoo! stores.

Adam Davis
Yahoo! Small Business