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1. At first glance these look like nice new features. It should be noted that if you have custom templates updating to the new Design Wizard will erase them, correct? Be careful….

   Comment by FinnishGifts — October 18, 2006 #

2. That is correct Chad. Merchants using version 2 of the Store Editor will see a page with a warning notice upon entering the Design Wizard. This page outlines the consequences of migrating to the new templates for established mercants–the largest of which is CUSTOM TEMPLATES WILL BE DELETED.

   The reason behind this is that the RTML operators actually perform differently in the 3.0 version of the Store Editor. Since an XHTML doctype is used, all tags now close properly and conform to standards. Because the output is different, in some cases dramatically so given the variance in how custom templates are created, we decided that migration should be merchant-controlled.

   Merchants can go to the Help section to learn more about when Design Wizard is useful for established merchants and also why migrating with custom templates is not recommended.

   The short answer for established merchants is while the new templates are a major improvement compared to the former base templates, custom templates typically include features in excess of even the new templates.

   Hope that makes it a little more clear.

   Paul

   Comment by Administrator — October 18, 2006 #

3. How can we add SEO friendly tags to individual products without using the Product Wizard?

   Comment by Chris — October 19, 2006 #

4. You can absolutely add page title, meta description and meta keywords without having to use the Add Product Wizard. For any stores using the new templates, all item and section pages will include page-title, description, and keywords fields.
   
   The Add Product Wizard helps merchants by taking information you enter and reusing that information for the fields–name is used for page-title and description is used for meta description; keywords is not pre-filled but this field holds little weight for major search engines.
   
   For established merchants that have migrated to the new templates you will need to add page-title, description, and keywords for existing items and sections–these fields are not added automatically when you migrate, but once you are on the new templates you can add these fields and the template will use them properly. For any new items you create, these fields will be added automatically but you will need to add values for these fields in the Store Editor.
   
   Paul

   Comment by Administrator — October 20, 2006 #

5. For new items I created, the description field is not added automatically using catalog manager.

   Comment by bobsc — October 20, 2006 #

6. Hello Paul,

   I’ve been a long time Yahoo Store user and I must tell you that this new feature is great. I picked a new design and the transition was a piece of cake! I did make a .csv file backup of all of my inventory data… just in case. :o)

   A unexpected pleasant surprise was that my conversion ration doubled after making the change.

   Good job Yahoo!

   Steve McArthur
   http://www.vacuumpartsmall.com/

   Comment by Steve McArthur — October 21, 2006 #

7. Hi Steve,

   Glad you are pleased with the results and thrilled to hear your conversion rates were positively affected as well. I see that you have customized your template–always nice to see merchants make our base templates their own by adding their own images.

   I did notice though that the hover color for your contents navigation link uses the same color as the contents background color. I’m guessing that was unintentional on your part as the effect on mouseover is the link seems to disappear. I would recommend changing that to a different color or you could risk confusing visitors that wonder where the link they hovered over went.

   Happy sales,

   Paul

   Comment by Administrator — October 21, 2006 #

8. WOW! I am truly amazed. Lot’s of nice little touches with the new templates. I have about 1200 products in my store, and I think switching it over took me about 6 minutes, a few more for the server side of things on the yahoo side, and I think it looks great! Of course it’s my site, so I’m biased, and I have some tweaking to do to make it look exactly how I want, but this sure beats the older style hands down. Great job again Yahoo !! Flawless transistion so far !!

   Comment by Pat Heiden — October 23, 2006 #

9. Hi Bob–

   We are checking into the description field issue you describe.

   Hi Pat–

   Glad to hear your migration went smoothly. The Design Wizard can work well for merchants that were using the older templates without customizations. For merchants with customizations, please read the help documentation around migration so you understand the consequences before migrating.

   Paul

   Comment by Administrator — October 23, 2006 #

10. […] The Y! Store Blog […]

    Pingback by Yahoo! Store gets rich interface with YUI — October 24, 2006 #

11. Hey there-great job on the blog. I have absorbed a lot of good SEO info, and look forward to implementing it into my site. I am trying to add my own buttons to my site, and can’t seem to figure out how to do it. Is there a site or group that you recommend that has tips and/or advice for people building their own site? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Comment by Bryan — November 3, 2006 #

12. Hi Bryan–glad you are finding the information useful. The blog itself is a great place to get tips for setting up stores. If you can’t figure out how to do something you can leave a comment on a post with your question or use the store blog feedback email to submit a question/topic for a future post.

    Yahoo! Store merchants gather in a few different forums depending on the topic for which you are looking for information, but one of the best is the forums run by long-time developer Don Cole over at YourStoreWizards.com. Many new and established store merchants regularly participate in the forums there and it is an invaluable resource to get expert advice, share best practices, and get recommendations for products and services to grow your store to the next level.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — November 3, 2006 #

13. Can we take the back up of the all the custom templates from yahoo store

    Comment by Akhilesh Padha — November 22, 2006 #

14. Hi there, I just purchased the yahoo small business and I love all the possibilites of the software. I am going to use it for two of my businesses.

    I am hoping you can help. I have around 36000 products stored in a MS ACCESS DB and need to move them to this store. What would be the best way to do this task?

    THanks for your help and input.

    Comment by Michael — March 20, 2007 #

15. Michael,

    With that many products there is really only one option–a database upload. I would encourage you to look through help for instructions on the database upload feature. You can start by taking a small set of products in Access and formatting that data in a csv file for uploading. Once you have successfully uploaded the small set, and seen what type of errors you may encounter (if any) you can do the same for your remaining products. You can perform an Add with an upload to add new products, or a Rebuild to replace what is currently there with the new CSV file contents. If you have images for all the products, you can also do a multiple image upload by naming your images to correspond to the product ID and putting them in a zip file. Consult the help for instructions on that as well.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — March 20, 2007 #

16. How do I build or import my product catalog? Is there tool/wizard to do this on Yahoo Stores?

    Comment by NewUser — April 23, 2007 #

17. Claude,

    There are two different ways you can approach adding products and the right tool depends on where you intend to build your site and how many products you need to add. Use the Add Product Wizard to add simple product data one at a time. This data is placed in your catalog which you can edit with Catalog Manager or Store Editor. Once you get the hang of adding products you can add them directly in the Store Editor, or in Catalog Manager if you are building in the Web Hosting portion of your account. Lastly, if you have hundreds of products to add at once, you can do a database upload. Search help for “database upload” to get instructions.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — April 24, 2007 #

18. We would like to migrate to the new Design Wizard - however we have over 15,000 product pages that were developed over the last 7 years using exclusively the Store Editor feature and/or catalog manager upload features. We do not use any custom templates (RTML). We have a standard header (head-tags) and footer (End-Tags) for all our pages, except our home page.

    Is it safe and easy to transition automatically to Design Wizard? or should we be watching out for some major setbacks.

    Thank you.

    Comment by Kasim — October 18, 2007 #

19. Kasim–Sorry for the delay in response–your message ended up in the Spam comments folder for some reason. While your site does not use “custom” templates, your site is also not set up in a standard way as you seem to be inserting the majority of HTML into the Head-tags field. This is not a standard configuration that was tested during the Design Wizard launch so I can only advise that you do not perform the migration as I cannot guarantee what will happen. Also, the custom menus you have would not be compatible with the new templates (though you could do the same approach possibly of inserting HTML into the Head section). Paul

    Comment by pboisver — October 25, 2007 #

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