Do you know the way to San Jose?

For those merchants who may be dreaming of a sunny vacation (especially those of you in the Northeast), but can’t bear the thought of being away from your business for days at a time, may I offer you a compromise: checkout the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition this June in San Jose, California. The Internet Retailer conference, sponsored by the magazine of the same name, runs from June 4th through June 7th.

Since Yahoo! is an exhibitor, we can offer you special promotional pricing to save an extra $100 on top of the early-bird pricing special (excludes exhibit hall only, single day or workshop only passes). Plus, you will get a $25 Starbucks Gift Card when you stop by our booth. To take advantage of this discount, use Exhibitor client code EC7334 while signing up through the special Exhibitor Client Discount Registration form.

The conference starts on June 4th If you choose to attend one of the two full-day workshops only, I would recommend the one on marketing your website which seems to be geared more towards small businesses. The following two days are filled with conference sessions where merchants attend common sessions in the morning but can choose from various tracks for the afternoon sessions depending on what topics you wish to learn about. Again the track for new merchants seems to offer the most promise for small businesses but you can bounce around to any session.

Some sessions of note:

• Day Two:
  • What E-Retailers Must Know About How Shoppers Use Their Sites
  • Identifying the E-Retailing Solutions Shoppers Find Most Useful
  • Marketing on a Budget—Promoting Your Web Site Without Going Broke
• Day Three:
  • The Scotch Boutique: The Web Is Made for Niche Retailing
  • How the Internet Creates Commodity Pricing—and What You Can Do About It
  • Getting Better Mileage From the Search Engines
  • How a Small Retailer Handles Customer Service

View full conference agenda

Regardless of when you attend, swing on by booth 1109 in the Exhibition hall to say “Hi”. Yahoo! Store representatives will be there if you have questions or comments and there may likely be some authorized Yahoo! Store developers if you are thinking of adding enhancements to your store and want some advice or a quote on services.

It’s not hard to imagine that picking up just one new idea from just one session could lead to a boost in sales that would exceed the cost of attending. It’s probably one of the best investments you can make in your business. Get more details (special bonus surprise included and no it’s not a set of Ginsu steak knives).

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Design Wizard Gets Updated

Just wanted to drop a quick post about some changes we pushed out today. The changes are mostly related to the recently released Design Wizard. Changes include:

• New color palettes: 14 new color palettes available in side and top navigation styles for a total 56 available styles for generic templates.
• New pre-designed templates: 2 new pre-designed templates for a total of 12 pre-designed templates.
• Dynamic header background size: For merchants that choose to upload a header background image, the Design Wizard will now show a full size preview of your header image and will pass the height value to the Store Editor. Formerly merchants needed to edit their CSS files to adjust for a larger header background image. Now a variable (header-background-image-height) controls this height for generic side navigation templates.
• New Yahoo! Sponsored Search Tag support: Merchants that have migrated to or signed up for and are using the new Yahoo! Sponsored Search platform can now automatically tag their order confirmation page. Once enabled and published, the tag will pass data to your Sponsored Search account for monitoring your campaigns. Learn more.

We are heads down, and have been since the beginning of the year, working on some larger releases for the coming months. We look forward to completing wizards for the Open for Business process and then turning our attention to generating traffic to make merchants even more successful.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Come Dine at the Search Engine and Marketing Smorgasbord

If you are like me, you may spend a bit too much time trying to keep up with the latest industry news and trends regarding search engines optimization and marketing. It’s certainly fair to say there is an avalanche of information out there with more added each day. As such, when I read about recently released Pipes, a feed aggregator (and manipulator) from Yahoo!, I thought it may be a more efficient way to keep up on the latest articles and research.

What Pipes allows you to do is get a bunch of different data feeds and create a mashup. Now you can get really creative with these such as combining several feeds, finding posts with a high number of views or comments, filter out duplicates, and show only the first 50 posts such as this mashup of digg, del.ico.us, reddit and slashdot. What I wanted to do was bring together some of the top SEO and Marketing blogs and put them all in one place for busy merchants to read. So here is the feed I put together called the Search Engine Smörgåsbord, one part search engine optimization, one part online marketing, spiced liberally with comments, and served fresh.

So what blogs are included? I pulled the top SEO blogs from Search Engine Journal’s top SEO blogs of 2006.*

• SEOmoz
• SERoundtable
• SEOBook
• Stuntdubl
• SEO by the Sea

Then I added top online marketing blogs pulled from Todd And’s Power 150 list. I didn’t pull the exact top five blogs here, but rather five that I felt had a lot of posts which would benefit small business owners/marketers.

• Duct Tape Marketing
• Copyblogger
• PronetAdvertising
• MarketingProfs Daily Fix
• Online Marketing Blog

So if this sounds interesting you can subscribe to the Search Engine Smörgåsbord and read the aggregated posts from the above blogs in your favorite newsreader. Now before you cry out in stunned disbelief and set your fingers flying to post a comment that I left out dozens of notable and worthy blogs in each category realize this—it’s only a starting point. The best part about Pipes is it is collaborative. You can edit my list to remove feeds or add feeds as you see fit. If you do, come back and post the link to your pipe and why you added particular blogs. In short, what dish are you bringing to the Smörgåsbord?

Also, and perhaps quite importantly, I recommend visiting each of the above sites and spending time there to read the archives and full-length articles. The blogs will keep you up on the latest news, but you should really peruse them in their natural environment so to speak to get the full benefit of them.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

* Astute observers will note Matt’s absence from the list despite his presence in the top 5. This is not to discount Matt’s contribution to understanding search engines (which is massive and highly beneficial). Rather, this is more an acknowledgment that his blog is not specifically about SEO in the way that the others are, and more so that he is like EF Hutton—when he talks, people listen. As such, most of you likely have his blog bookmarked already.

Playing Cupid, 50 Times a Minute

Vermont Teddy Bear’s Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Hosted Website Braces for Record Valentine’s Day

With about 30% of its year’s business riding on the brief Valentine’s Day holiday, Vermont Teddy Bear predicts its most intense “peak” season in the company’s 26-year history.

“We market mostly to male last-minute shoppers, and because Valentine’s Day falls on a Wednesday, we have a sort of ‘perfect storm’ that means the vast majority of our orders will be taken in just a handful of hours on two very busy days,” says Vermont Teddy Bear Company CEO Elisabeth Robert.

The company reaches its target customer (whom Vermont Teddy Bear refers to internally as “Late Jack”) through thousands of live radio spots, television commercials, online ads, emails and direct-mail catalogs. The company’s Valentine’s Day teddy bears, like “Loverboy” with a heart-shaped tattoo, or “Bear Naked” wearing nothing but a fig leaf, are hand-made in Vermont and are a popular alternative to flowers.

Since first venturing online in 1997, Vermont Teddy Bear has continuously been hosted on the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions ecommerce platform.

“We’ve asked Yahoo engineers to brace themselves for a top pace of about 1,500 orders per website per hour,” says Robert. That’s about 50 orders per minute, combined.

“With the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions e-commerce platform, Vermont Teddy Bear will have a worry-free peak Valentine’s season. Supported by Yahoo!’s world class network, Merchant Solutions is reliable and scalable, and handles billions of dollars in transactions each year, including busy holiday and event-based sales spikes,” said Jimmy Duvall, director of e-commerce, Yahoo! Small Business. “Yahoo!’s e-commerce solution is designed to easily accommodate surges of last-minute shoppers.”

In February the company’s staff temporarily swells from about 250 people to over 1,250 to handle the expected Valentine’s Day volume. Extra UPS trailers line the long driveway at Vermont Teddy Bear’s Shelburne, Vermont, headquarters, waiting to be loaded.

Customers can order any time and have their package held to arrive precisely on February 14th, Valentine’s Day. But in a quarter century selling Valentine’s gifts to men, the company has learned many guys put off gift buying to the very last moment. In recent years Vermont Teddy Bear has stretched operations to the limit to satisfy that last-minute demand – - accepting orders as late as 10 pm Eastern the night before, for guaranteed arrival on Valentine’s Day.

Peak season is complicated by the fact that one of the company’s sister brands, PajamaGram.com, launched in 2002 and also hosted by Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, is now the Vermont Teddy Bear Company’s fastest-growing line of business. This year, for the first time, PajamaGram eclipsed parent company Vermont Teddy Bear in annual sales transacted online. Between all its brands, over 67% of the company’s sales come in across the web.

“The amount of business we transact online has grown more than thirty-fold since we launched our first website a decade ago,” says Robert, “Yahoo! has always been there to make sure our sites are up and performing well. This Valentine’s Day, we’ll sell more gifts online in a couple hours than we used to in the entire month of February. And if we can make a few hundred thousand sweethearts happy on Valentine’s Day, then we’re happy.”

About the Vermont Teddy Bear Company

Each Vermont Teddy Bear Company Bear-Gram gift includes a customized Vermont Teddy Bear accompanied by a personal greeting card and candy treat, all packaged in a colorful gift box with an air hole. Orders are placed by calling 1-800-829-BEAR or by shopping at VermontTeddyBear.com

The company’s fast-growing PajamaGram brand is a gift delivery service where customers can pamper their loved ones by sending pajamas and spa products in luxurious packaging by calling 1-800-GIVE-PJS or shopping at PajamaGram.com.

The company also offers floral gifts from Calyx Flowers, gourmet foods and sweets from the TastyGram Company, and handbags and accessories from Gift Bag Boutique.