Archive for the ‘Yahoo! Store’ Category

Over the next few months Yahoo! Merchant Solutions will be releasing a series of feature releases. A sneak preview of the new releases is now available for merchants on the Yahoo! platform. Check out what you can expect to change or improve on your store this year.

• Saved Cards for Customer Registration: The saved cards feature is for the customer registration system. It gives registered customers the ability to store credit and debit card information within their customer profile, enabling a more efficient checkout process. Customers can add, edit, or delete card information at any time. You can expect this release this month.

• Enhanced Site Search: This is the first of a multi-phased feature release to upgrade the existing site search functionality for Yahoo! Stores. It is expected to be a huge improvement over the current site search with the initial set of enhancements being released in August.

• Incremental Publishing in Store Editor: To facilitate more efficient store publishing for merchants, Yahoo! is updating the publishing functionality to all for either an incremental or full page publish in Store Editor. Merchants can expect to see this release in August or September.

• Page-Level 301 Redirects: Yahoo! is currently working on a new feature that will allow merchants to manage page-level redirects to help with SEO needs. It is under development at this time and Yahoo! expects a launch in 2011.

To read more about the upcoming releases from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, click here.

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A picture is worth a thousand words. That saying goes a lot further for online merchants, who don’t have the advantage of allowing customers to actually hold a product in their hand(s) and interact with it. For years, merchants have relied on innovative features such as Click to Enlarge to bring their customers alternate views, informative captions, product variations, and detail shots via a series of still images.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video would probably be worth billions. The potential truly is unlimited! Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and the rise of social media, as well as video hosting sites such as YouTube, make the process so dead simple, there’s really no reason not to leverage that power.

Video can be used pretty much anywhere in your store, whether it’s an item page, an article page, or in the header of your section pages; you will use an identical process to display the videos. If the video is already on YouTube (many manufacturers do this), simply look it up and click the ‘Embed’ button to get the code you need. If you need to upload the video, you’ll want to set up an account, log in, and then click the ‘Upload’ button to the right of the search bar. (more…)

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One of the first tips in eCommerce: never intentionally send someone out of your store to an external site where they may not remember to come back to complete their purchase. With that being said, there are always cases where a site owner might want to link to another site of complementary content. An exchange of links between two sites that have complementary products or information can be a great way to help get your site noticed by search engines.

Many times merchants would like to create a simple links section in which to display links (with or without logos) to sites that link back to them, their friends, or just link to content that is informative for their customers. To be perfectly honest, the best kind of link you can get is one that comes from a reputable source of information, and is only incoming, rather than reciprocated. Beggars can’t be choosers though, and any links coming in to your site are helpful as long as each link goes to relevant content.

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions gives you a very simple way to accomplish this, without writing a single line of code. (more…)

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Oftentimes, you’ll need to use some common codes such as the copyright or registered trademark symbols as part of either the population of your products, or in the footer of the website. These symbols are normally hidden in your typefaces as special characters that would either be automatically replaced in the document by your word processor, by holding a modifier key, or by opening a character map on your computer and pasting it in place. Since HTML was created to be a simple, text-only language, it doesn’t recognize those characters the same way that a complex word processor does. This is further confounded by differences in the way type works on a PC, a Mac, and a Linux computer. In order to display the characters properly in a web browser on all platforms, there are simple codes that need to be entered rather than copying and pasting the actual special character from your word processing software.

Here is a list of some common special characters, and how to type them in HTML so that web browsers on all platforms know how to display them properly. (more…)

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