Yahoo! to help Small Businesses in the Gulf Coast get “back in business”—and Store will be there!

Yahoo! Small Business, in coordination with BellSouth, will be helping businesses in the Gulf Coast area set up online business presences. On Friday April 7, Yahoo! employees will be on hand at the Hotel Intercontinental in New Orleans to train and advise businesses in the following areas:

• Creating/designing a web site
• Setting up an e-commerce store (session to be led by Solid Cactus)
• Succeeding in a Post-Katrina environment (session to be led by local business partners)
• Risk assessment and planning for small businesses
• Driving traffic to a site through initiating a Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaign
• Using the Internet to drive local traffic to your site through Yahoo! Local

Businesses that participate in the session will be eligible for up to $1500 worth of free products and online services*. If you are a current Yahoo! merchant in the Gulf Coast region, or know a business person in the area, please pass along the details of the program to them. Small business owners and entrepreneurs interested in taking part can get more information or register online.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

*Limited time offer. Other restrictions apply. Click here for details.

RTML Tips# 1—Optimizing Publishing Times

The following post comes from Sheridan Rawlins, Yahoo! Small Business engineer, covers the use of RTML Operators and how certain custom template configurations can lead to long publishing times. The post is intended for Yahoo! Store Developers or merchants with an advanced understanding of RTML. Learn more about RTML.

In my role as lead engineer for the Editor & RTML language, I have come across questions regarding “slow publishing”. Almost invariably, the store or developer requesting assistance has customized their templates in some way. I would like to share some insights by describing answers to some frequently asked questions, along with their resolutions. With this knowledge, developers should be able to spread the best-practices for reducing publishing times for templates.

What causes Editor publishing to take a long time?

The most common root cause of slowness is due to having to fetch objects from disk. We do our best to cache as much as we can in memory, but as complex RTML templates are run on larger stores, or stores with complex object relationships, objects may be written back to disk and flushed from the cache to make room for other objects.

What operators cause objects to be read from disk?

• WITH-OBJECT
• FOR-EACH-OBJECT
• GET-PATH-TO (single “breadcrumb”)
• GET-ALL-PATHS-TO (multi “breadcrumbs”)

Contrary to popular belief, the WHOLE-CONTENTS operator does not cause cache-misses. However, it is usually used in conjunction with a FOR-EACH-OBJECT loop, which causes every object to be read into memory sequentially, almost guaranteeing that the cache will overflow and cause disk accesses.

What can I do to increase the speed of publishing my store?

There are several techniques to use to help improve the speed of publishing:

• Don’t repeat yourself – use WITH= to save the results of expensive operations where possible.
• Try not to nest FOR-EACH-OBJECT loops. Sometimes it’s inevitable, due to the nature of what you’re trying to accomplish, just be aware of this, and use trick #1 when you need to get object information (such as @name, or @price) multiple times.
• Try to keep your store hierarchy simple (see below)

I use the same templates for several stores. Why does one store publish faster than another?

Sometimes algorithms can be affected by the data. Take for instance multi-breadcrumbs. We’ve provided the operator GET-ALL-PATHS-TO in order to provide the fastest means of getting paths typically from INDEX -> id. The number of paths returned depends upon the data set.

Figure 1 – single inheritance (1 path per item) 

If all items and sections are only contained by one section or index, then the answer set is small. (See Figure 1)

Figure 2 – multiple inheritance (3 paths)

If, however, a store has items listed in many sections, then the problem grows to be as many sections as each item is listed in. (See Figure 2)

Figure 3 – multiple inheritance at multiple levels (9 paths)

Progressing further, if sections are contained in other sections, and yet all paths lead upwards, the problem multiplies to be all combinations of sections leading up to the top element. (See Figure 3)

Figure 4 – multiple inheritance with loops (585 paths)

The highest level of complexity is when there are “loops” in the hierarchy coupled with multiple sections leading to INDEX. If section A is contained in B, and B is contained in A, then the problem blows into the most complex yet, as it is each combination with 2 elements * each combination with 3 elements, etc up to the number of elements which are cross-referential. (See Figure 4)

This complexity also changes drastically with additional sections:

Hopefully these tips will help you make changes to your templates to make them more efficient and quicker to publish. Stay tuned for more RTML tips in later posts.

Sheridan Rawlins
Yahoo! Small Business

Tips on Mining Converting Keywords

Today’s Y!Store blog is a guest column by long time Yahoo! Store owner and developer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers. Rob posts regularly in his blog about all things Yahoo! Store, is the author of the upcoming book, “Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies,” and is conducting Yahoo! Store marketing workshops beginning this spring in California.

Howdy! Looking for tips on converting keywords (the search words your customers use to find your store and buy the products you sell)? You’ve come to the right place. In this article I’m going to tell you what converting keywords are, why these specific keywords are so important, and where you can find your converting keywords inside your Yahoo! Store Manager.

When I first started marketing Yahoo! Stores way back in 1997, I noticed the same types of keywords showing up again and again as the referring keywords in orders on many different types of stores. More generic terms like wallaby supplies might drive more traffic, but more often than not the converting keywords in the Rev-Share URL or Referrer would be much more specific terms like acme wallaby pouch organizer or soothing wallaby tail cream. The more I optimized my sites for these specific terms, the more sales increased.

Converting keywords are somewhat more obscure than generic search terms, too. Fewer searches for specific keywords result in less traffic, but that makes these keywords better for you - much less competitive for search engine optimization and sponsored search ad bidding.

Shoppers searching on these more specific terms convert at a much, much higher rate than generic Web traffic searching on more generic terms. For every 100 people visiting the average online store, 97 or 98 won’t buy anything. Frustrating, I know, but I’m not particularly interested in these folks. However, I am extremely interested in the two or three folks who actually put something in their cart and bought something. If you can attract more visitors like the folks who buy, you obviously have a better chance of increasing your sales.

As Paul mentioned in an earlier post, you can find your converting keywords in your orders themselves, but here are several different places where I collect converting keywords:

• Merchant order e-mails: I like to look at each order e-mail as it comes in and see what the customer searched for, what engine they came from and what they bought. Around half of my orders have Rev-Share URL or Referrer data, and I just click on the link to see what my customers saw on the particular search engine to find my store.
• Export orders: You can export up to 3000 orders at a time and get Referrer data and Entry page (no Rev-Share URLs, though) out of the Orders.csv file. This is an easy way to get started organizing your converting keywords when you have a store with a lot of order history.
• Sales reports: One little known feature of the Store Manager’s Sales report is the ability to see all the orders for a specific product in a given date range. When a product has around 50 (or fewer) orders in a date range, the quantity field (number of orders) becomes a link to all the orders for that product. If you have more than 50 orders for that product and want to use this feature, simply shorten the date range to a smaller number of orders. This feature is important because you can see one product’s Rev-Share URLs and Referrer data in one place which is very helpful to see product-specific trends and patterns with converting keywords. Sometimes it’s easier to work with one product at a time than dealing with all your converting keywords for hundreds or thousands of products.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing conversion rate tracking: If you have a Sponsored Search account with Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or another search marketing company, you can see which keywords converted into sales by activating conversion tracking on your account and adding a little bit of JavaScript code to your Order Confirmation page (this tool is called “Conversion Counter” in a Yahoo! Search Marketing account); adding the JavaScript is not necessary if you enable Conversion Counter or Marketing Console tags with Store Manager. Once a month I do a keyword report on my Yahoo! Sponsored Search account and add these converting keywords to my list.
• Third-party analytics software: Third-party software vendors like KeywordMax, ClickTracks, or Indextools offer tracking software that collect some converting keyword data that the Store Manager just doesn’t seem to grab. You just put their JavaScript code in your Head-tags field (under Variables) and on your Order Confirmation page, and almost like magic you get all this extra data. You do have to pay extra for this service, but since I get anywhere from 20-25% of my converting keywords from these third-party tools, it’s worth it to me!

Knowing your converting keywords is crucial to your online success. Once you know what these converting keywords are, you must do everything in your power to make sure your store comes up in both the free search results (by optimizing your website) and the paid search results (through sponsored listings) for these very important keywords. In a future installment, I’ll give you some very specific things you can do to help you rank well for these valuable phrases in the free search results as well as the paid search ads.

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Coupons in Checkout—A Bane or Boost to Conversion

I read an interesting discussion thread recently on Webmaster World regarding the labeling of the coupon field in checkout. The merchant posting the thread was receiving calls from customers asking how they could get a coupon. The merchant also wondered if labeling the field “coupon code” was causing shoppers to abandon carts to look for a coupon code, thus missing out on sales that were likely to happen.

Many other merchants confirmed that they have witnessed higher cart abandonment rates with a field labeled “coupon code” rather than another label that is not associated with receiving a discount. In addition to individual comments, the thread references a study (PDF file) conducted by Vanderbilt University professors Richard Oliver and Mikhael Shor that focused on how the presence of coupon codes in checkout affected purchasing decisions. The authors found that shoppers without a coupon code were less likely to buy compared to shoppers with a code, or even shoppers that never saw a coupon field, because they felt they weren’t getting the best possible deal.

When you have gone through the work (and possibly expense) of attracting qualified traffic to your site, and shoppers have added items to their shopping cart, the last thing you want is to distract them with thoughts that they may be able to get a better deal by leaving to search for a coupon—unless of course you have general use coupons set up to drive special promotions.

Another merchant pointed out that for one of his sites, coupons are listed as a top-level section so shoppers without a coupon can easily find one. The merchant also provides a link next to the coupon code field that directs shoppers to the coupon page.

Example coupon section with link to Coupon page.

The coupon page lists the general use coupons such as $X off orders over $100 or free shipping on orders over $XX. These are coupons that are designed not as a reward for select loyal shoppers but promotions that drive larger order sizes.

Fortunately Checkout Manager, currently in beta release, makes it easy to either change the default label of any field in checkout or add text or links on almost any page in checkout. To change the label of the field go to Checkout Manager > Page Configuration and select the field you wish to edit. You can also select a section and add a plain text field (including links).

Coupon section in Checkout Manager with link to Coupon page. Be sure to use a full path to the coupon page, not a relative path and open in a new window so buyers are not leaving your checkout pages.

Read the thread for yourself and decide which approach makes sense to you. Sites with specific coupons may wish to rename the field to disguise the purpose, whereas sites that use coupons for promotions may wish to call extra attention to the field.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business