Leveraging Yahoo Store

By Nancy T Willy

If you are an individual with an urge to start your own e-commerce site or a businessman who would like to turn your brick-and-mortar business into a click-and-mortar one, what are the options you have?

1. Get a website designer to make the site for you, find a good hosting company, get a search engine expert to optimize your site to bring traffic and a shipping company to ship your products fast and safe to your customers.
2. Develop all this expertise in-house so that you can closely monitor everything.

One look at these solutions would tell you that they are time-consuming and complicated. The easiest method of building your online e-commerce store is through Yahoo Stores.

What is a Yahoo Store?

Yahoo store is an online merchant solution that enables you to build, manage and market your online store in the easiest and the most inexpensive manner. Yahoo stores allow you to choose between the many options based on the services available, price ranges, and the scale of your business.

What are the services available?

Yahoo offers services like

• Domain name with 100 email accounts
• Option of choosing different tools for designing the site, like Yahoo Sitebuilder, Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.
• Yahoo web hosting features like 10 GB disk space and 200 GB bandwidth per month
• Easy-to-use shopping cart and check out pages
• Ability to organize and segregate items in the store using a Store Catalog
• Ability to track and confirm the status of orders received on your site
• Round-the-clock support for any queries or problems in setting up the store
• Discounts on marketing initiatives related to Yahoo
• Tools to prevent any kind of fraud
• Merchandising tools for better conversion
• Detailed reporting on store performance

What are the options available and how are they different?

The three different options are Starter, Standard and Professional. Basic differences between the three options are listed in the table below.

These services are dependant on the option that you choose on the Yahoo store.

	Starter	Standard	Professional
Monthly fee	$39.95/m	$99.95/m	$299.95/m
Transaction fee	1.5 %	1 %	.75 %
Setup fee	$50	$50	$50
Orders received	By email only	Email and fax	Email and fax
Reporting	Not detailed	Detailed	Detailed
Additional features		Coupons, Cross-selling tools, gift-certificates	Coupons, Cross-selling tools, gift-certificates, Scalability

How to set up a Yahoo Store?

Step 1: Registration to Yahoo Merchant Solutions

During the registration process, you would be asked to provide the following information. The company contact information, business name, domain name, credit card information, yahoo id and password.

Step 2: Explore “Manage my Services”

This tab is seen on the upper right-hand side of the yahoo store window. It has 4 different options:

• Store Manager: Store manager gives you a variety of options like managing your product catalog, processing orders and requests, viewing reports on website performance, changing the order settings and site settings, managing promotions and also provides resources and tips on managing the store.
• Website Hosting Control Pane: Displays the disk space and the options to build web site. You can also manage the files associated with your website.
• Business Mail Control Panel: Helps you to manage the mail accounts associated with the merchant solutions package.
• Domains Control Panel: Managing the domain and sub domains associated with the merchant solutions package.
  

Step 3: Credit card payments

You must have a merchant account with a bank or with a service provider to accept credit card payments.

Step 4: Upload products onto the Catalog Manager

You can choose the fields that you would like to specify for your products (like Id, Name, Caption, Image, Price etc.). The products can be uploaded one-by-one or one-shot in a single “.csv” file. Inventory management can also be done in an effective manner.

Step 5: Having good website content

Your site should have precise, easy to understand and compelling content in the homepage, product pages, contact page, check out page etc.

Step 6: Build your store

Yahoo gives you the option to build your store using any of the popular tools like Yahoo Sitebuilder, Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage.

Step 7: Finalizing your backend operations

Backend Operations involves specifying details like the custom order, checkout process, methods of payment, shipping details, tax etc.

Step 8: Marketing your store

Yahoo provides you merchandising solutions like cross-selling, discount offers, gift certificates etc., depending on the merchant solution that you have chosen.

Step 9: Attracting customers

Your can use methods like adwords, direct mails, advertising etc., to attract traffic of customers to your store.

Step 10: Managing orders

Orders can be received via the Store Manager in Yahoo, own servers, fax or email and processed using Yahoo interface or using own network.

Step 11: Keep checking your store performance

Your store performance can be continuously monitored using Yahoo Reporting. The reports can be used to modify product details to improve trafficking.

These steps help you set up your own e-commerce business with minimum time and effort. In short, Yahoo store is one of the most effective tools to make your store a successful one.

What next?

Fill in our contact us form to know how Nabler can help. It would be our pleasure to assist you in making your business succeed.

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