Official Yahoo! Store Blog tips and tricks for ecommerce success » 2007

Adding a Little Bling to Your Site

January 26, 2007 | In Merchant Questions, Tricks | 51 Comments

I’ve seen a few merchants ask how to add a favicon to their site. If you don’t know what a favicon is, it’s the small icon that appears for some sites in the address bar of your browser or in the bookmarks or favorites listings.

favicon in address bar
Figure 1: Favicon appearing in the Address bar

favicon in bookmarks
Figure 2: Favicon appearing in Bookmarks.

Adding this to your store is pretty simple. Here are some instructions.

Step1: Create your favicon

You can skip ahead if you already have a favicon ready to go. Creating your favicon can be easy. There are sites that will generate a favicon for you from an image that you upload. Dynamic Drive has one such tool. If you are generating a favicon from an image you have though, make sure it is an appropriate size and design. Your final image size will be 16 x 16 pixels—not much room to work with. As such, you need to start with an image that is square so when it is resized, things stay proportional. Also, while the image you start with may look good at 100 x 100, it may be unreadable when resized. Start with a simple design for best results.

If you are more adventurous and wish to create your own favicon from scratch, there are sites that offer online favicon creator tools to do so. If you want a favicon, but don’t know where to start, many of our Yahoo! Store developers offer graphic design services and can easily help. Once you have your favicon, upload the file (either in the Files area of the Store Editor or the File Manager in the Web Hosting portion of your account).

Step 2: Adding the code for the favicon

After you have your icon, you need to add the link to your favicon.

Store Editor

Add the following code to the Head-tags variable:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://enter-url-here-to-your-store/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Building on the Web Hosting side

Add the above code between the <head> and </head> tags of each page in your store.

Notes:

Be sure to name your file favicon.ico
Be sure to replace the URL listed in the code sample with the full path to your favicon.
IE users: You may need to add your site to your favorites, close your browser and then revisit the site to see your favicon appear the first time.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

P.S. If you need some inspiration in terms of what your favicon could look like, here is a link to a site with a large collection of favicons to use for inspiration in creating your own.

Free Wisdom While Supplies Last

January 19, 2007 | In Marketing/Promotion | 3 Comments

Ever wish you could hang out and have a drink with over 100 top marketing professionals. Imagine the stories, lessons, and other nuggets of wisdom you could pick up and apply to your business. Well I’m not sure what bar you would need to go to or what conference to crash in order to find them, but thankfully you don’t need to go farther than your computer.

Marketing Sherpa, a research firm for professional marketers, has polled their readers and compiled stories, lessons, and insider tips from over 100 marketers. The 60-page report is available to download for free. FREE!!!! Here is a list of the topics covered and the number of entries for each:

Search marketing (17)
Email marketing (21)
Blogs and podcasts (9)
General marketing and advertising (13)
Social networking (6)
Websites (16)
B to B marketing (14)
On the job (14)

While some of these tips come from enterprise-level companies, and thus may not always be applicable to smaller businesses, the information should be invaluable for you in terms of thinking about your own marketing efforts. There is a nice blend of both strategy and tactics and all the stories are short and to the point, because no one has less time than small business owners who don’t have the luxury of huge marketing departments or limitless budgets to bring in hired guns.

Marketing Sherpa: Marketing Wisdom for 2007

So download and print this one out, and pull out the tips you think could help drive your business. Sipping on your favorite beer or cocktail while reading is optional.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Dressing up Your Invoices

January 12, 2007 | In Tricks | 7 Comments

Reading through merchant emails lately has allowed me to see some feature requests that I hadn’t heard of before. One request that I saw a few emails for was a means to add a company logo to order invoices or packing slips. Merchants were concerned about the “out of the box” experience (the process of unpacking the ordered item). While we don’t have this feature in the product currently, I did try a few different ways to accomplish this with minimal effort.

The Easy Way

The easiest way to add a company logo is to create your own company letterhead on which you print invoices or packing slips. You can put your logo as a watermark to appear at the top of your invoices.

example of packing slip with company logo

Invoices only have a half inch (0.5”) top margin so in the example above, I have placed the logo at the top right of the page. You can view an invoice in Acrobat Reader and copy the information to a Word document for determining the proper location for your logo. You may need to resize your logo to fit within the allotted space.

Another option would be to set the opacity of your logo to a value less than 50% and place it at the top center as a background image. The text for the invoice or packing slip will appear over the logo, but with the right logo, this can look professional; I would not recommend this approach for logos with a lot of text though.

Another option is to use the right margin and align your company name or logo vertically.

example with logo in sidebar

The example above shows a packing slip which has a larger available right margin (1.5”) in which to place your design. The invoice, which would likely be more commonly used, has a smaller available margin (0.7”) so your design would have to be more compact than the one shown above. Also, you may wish to use professional printing services with a design such as the example above. Printing a similar design in your office may not allow you to “bleed” the color to the edge of the paper as most office printers have a minimal margin, even if you set your word processor to have no margins.

Once you have the design you wish to use, you can have a print shop produce a large quantity. Before you spend the money to print large quantities though, make sure you test your design on both invoices and packing slips (if you send one or the other depending on if the order is a gift). Then just load your printer with your custom paper and print the invoice or packing slip as you process orders.

The Real Easy Way

Perhaps an even easier way, though it may not be right for all type of stores, is a customized rubber stamp. A quick search for “custom rubber stamps” showed multiple services that will help you create/design a custom rubber stamp for your store. You can even make it specific to packing such as “packed with care at Insert Store Name Here”. Then, you can simply print and stamp orders during the packing process.

The Not So Easy (But Not Quite So Hard) Way

One final way to add your logo to invoices or packing slips is by editing the files before printing them. You can download invoices or packing slips in PDF format and then run batch process action in Adobe Acrobat® for applying your logo as a background or watermark. Note this method requires you to have the full version of Acrobat, and not just Acrobat Reader®.

An alternate way is to download your invoices or packing slips in HTML file format (use the “options” button to switch the format from the default PDF format) and then insert your logo and print. If you have Macromedia Dreamweaver® you can set up a batch process by recording commands which you can repeat on multiple files. After editing the original files, you can then print the files.

The obvious downside to these last two methods (apart from needing to own additional software) is it will require some additional time to process orders. This may be fine for merchants with a low volume of orders, or at times of the year when orders are fewer, but this may present too much of a burden if orders pick up.

Remember though—in your quest to look like the ecommerce giants, don’t forget that as simple an act as writing thank you on your invoices, can make an even bigger impression on buyers.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Keeping the Holiday Momentum

January 3, 2007 | In Marketing/Promotion | 1 Comment

Today’s post comes from Scott Sanfilippo, co-founder and President of Solid Cactus, a full-service web design company specializing in the development of Yahoo! Stores. Scott and his business partner Joe Palko co-founded one of the first e-commerce sites, FerretStore.com, in 1994. After years of selling ferret hats, Scott still enjoys working in the pet industry, he serves as company spokesperson for Solid Cactus and keeps busy scheduling free training webinars, “boot camps” and other interactive events for e-commerce store owners.

Sure, they love you in December. But will they still love you in January?

You’ve just invested big money in search engines to attract customers to your website for the holidays. It worked, and not only are seasonal sales up, you have a batch of new customers. Now, how do you keep them coming back in the New Year?

It’s one of the questions we’re asked most at Solid Cactus. “How do I get my holiday shoppers to come back after the holidays?” The simple answer is, marketing. The fact is; you’ve already done the hard part. You’ve already invested money to acquire that customer once, now use some creativity to get them to be a repeat shopper. Here are some suggestions:

Email Marketing

Right after the New Year, send an email to every new customer you acquired from November 1st through the end of the year and thank them for their business. Then, offer them something special such as free shipping or a price or percentage break on their next order. Or, go straight to premiums and offer a free gift with their next order. Be sure to choose something which matches their purchase profile when possible. I suggest using Got Marketing, which can be done right in the back-end of your Yahoo! Store. You can track the effectiveness of your email through Got Marketing, and you can offer the recipients of this email an easy way to unsubscribe.

Postal Mail

Email may be instant, but nothing can beat the impression of direct mail. Have a postcard created to send out to your holiday customers that not only acts as a “thank you” card but also a coupon for something off their next order. For your large orders, consider sending a greeting card. Everyone gets mail at their house and an attractive postcard that stands out, hits the message home. Best of all, postal mail doesn’t have a spam filter so your message is guaranteed to reach your customer.

The most important ingredient to the success of any follow-up via email or postal mail is “the hook” – some type of a call to action to get that customer to come back.

You may be saying “but most of my holiday shoppers buy my products as gifts for someone else.” That’s perfect! The gift givers can either keep your offer for themselves or pass it on to someone they know who can use the offer – perhaps someone new who can become a brand new customer!

Scott Sanfilippo,
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Adding a Little Bling to Your Site

Free Wisdom While Supplies Last

Dressing up Your Invoices

The Easy Way

The Real Easy Way

The Not So Easy (But Not Quite So Hard) Way

Keeping the Holiday Momentum

Email Marketing

Postal Mail

Syndicate

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