Yahoo! Store March ‘07 Release: Payment Center, PayPal Website Payments Pro and Other New Features

Just a brief post to announce some new features and changes we will be rolling out late tomorrow night (3/22/07 PDT) to improve payment processing setup and management. Since some of these changes will happen automatically when you publish your order settings, I recommend that you preview these changes in Checkout Manager (for merchants on the latest version of checkout) prior to publishing your order settings. Here is a list of new features and changes:

• PayPal Checkout Button: For merchants with PayPal Express Checkout enabled, PayPal has updated the PayPal checkout button appearing on the cart page. You can preview the change in Checkout Manager and you will need to publish your order settings to get the new button in your checkout pages. Learn more.

• PayPal Website Payments Pro: Yahoo! Store now supports PayPal Website Payments Pro to use as a merchant account for online credit card processing and manual transactions. Merchants can sign up for or set up an existing PayPal account from the Payment Center. Learn more.
• Payment Center: The Pay Methods section has been replaced by the Payment Center which provides a simplified more intuitive interface for displaying the payment processors, any associated card types, and the payment options currently displayed.
  • Reordering payment options: you can now choose in which order to display payment options in your checkout pages to put a certain card type at the top of the drop-down list. Learn more.
  • Automatic testing for payment processors and card types: When you set up a new payment processor, we will automatically perform a test authorization for the major card types and show any for which your merchant account is approved.

• Checkout Manager
  • Hide the “Other” Billing Address: You can streamline the look of your checkout pages with the ability to hide the “Other” Billing address. Buyers can click to expand this section if specifying a Billing address other than the Shipping address. Learn more.
  • Hide Checkout field without errors when validating input: You can further streamline your checkout with the ability to hide entire sections in checkout that do not contain errors when a buyer misses a required field or enters invalid data into a field. Buyers can then focus only on the remaining fields which need to be corrected. Learn more.

Note: The Checkout Manager features will not be automatically enabled. You must go to Checkout Manager > Advanced Settings to enable these two features.

We would love to get your feedback on these changes and look forward to introducing more features in the upcoming months to make your stores easier to setup, manage, and grow.

Duncan Shen
Yahoo! Small Business

Solid Cactus Launches FeedPerfect–Free 30-day Trial

Brian Smith of SingleFeed recently authored a two-part article on shopping comparison engines, how merchants can work with them and get started using them. The following post comes from Scott Sanfilippo, co-founder and President of Solid Cactus, about a recent product introduction aimed at making shopping comparison engines a valuable channel for small businesses.–Paul

As e-commerce grows, many consumers are choosing to shop through merchant product aggregators, known as Shopping Comparison Engines (SCEs) like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Yahoo! Shopping, etc. SCEs help consumers more easily identify items and more conveniently compare pricing between merchants.This is a growing market. Forrester Research estimates SCE revenues are expected to reach $54.3 billion in 2007, or a whopping 27% of e-commerce sales. If that’s not a push to get your products into the SCEs, I don’t know what is.

The key to a successful SCE campaign is careful monitoring. Since most are pay-per-click, the problem arises when you see a bill at the end of the month, telling you that you lost money on an SCE. Was that because they shopped but didn’t buy anything, or was the campaign unprofitable because of a few non-performing items? The answers to these questions can make or break your future on an SCE, and those answers are difficult to find.

The challenge

Having run a successful e-commerce store for 13 years, I was keenly aware of how much money was spent on SCEs and how important they were to our sales. I also knew it was important to have visibility into that monthly bill to see if a particular SCE or even a particular product was a loser. But I didn’t want to pay upwards of $1,000 per month and an additional percentage of sales to get that visibility. There had to be a better way.

The solution

Our advanced programming department at Solid Cactus was charged with the task of creating an application that not only showed how much money was spent, lost and made in the SCEs, but also “fed” products to them and was affordable. After 18 months, the result is what we have today, Feed Perfect.
For feeding, Feed Perfect has the categorization method and data requirements for each SCE built into the application. All you need to do is map the fields from your store to our global fields. When it comes to categorization there is no guess work. You select the SCE you’re categorizing products for and Feed Perfect will show you what is available.

Dashboard view of FeedPerfect where merchants can view account and channel alerts, graphs for the various channels, and which products are performing well or poorly.

Once your products are in the SCEs, Feed Perfect’s robust reporting engine will provide you with pre-defined reports to give you product level ROI based reports that you can take action on. The best part… you can see what products aren’t performing and exclude them from the feed in just a few clicks of a mouse.

Since its launch on March 1st, customers are already saving hundreds of dollars a month. The cost for Feed Perfect is at least eighty percent less than competing products and has just as many bells, whistles and analytical expertise that the more expensive packages offer.

Feed Perfect takes only a few minutes to setup and it fully integrates with your Yahoo! Store. And to show you how much money you can save, we’re offering all new sign-ups a free 30-day trial. So go ahead, log onto http://www.feedperfect.com, and setup your account and start “feeding.” If you run into problems along the way, we offer free technical support. If you want more information on Feed Perfect, we’re offering free informational webinars. A complete schedule can be found at http://events.solidcactus.com.

Scott Sanfilippo
Guest blogger forYahoo! Small Business

Thinking About Shopping Comparison Engines:Part Two

This post comes to you courtesy of Brian Smith. In the first post of this two-part article, Brian talked about concerns merchants may have with shopping comparison sites. In part two Brian discusses how to get started with shopping comparison engines.–Paul

Step 1: Make sure you’re ready to track everything. Yahoo! Store provides basic analytics through the “References”’ link under “Statistics”. You might also consider upgrading to analytics packages like Google Analytics, WebTrends, or Coremetrics.

Step 2: Sign up with the shopping comparison engines. Start with Google Base (it’s free) and then add: Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla. There are many other shopping engines, but working with these six will give you a good idea of how the marketing channel performs. Think of this as a test. Spend at least $100/engine in order to collect the data you need to make informed decisions going forward.

Step 3: Set up your data feeds. You can start with an automated data feed submission program, but realize that this feed must be optimized to get great results. To use the Yahoo! Store automated feed, you’ll need to enable the export of the feed. To do this, click the “Search Engines” link under Promote in the Store Manager and click the radio button next to “enable” in the Export Store Content section. When you sign up with the engines, they will ask you if you want them to grab this XML feed. When you sign up for Google Base, the system will instruct you to sign up for their Google Base Store Connector service.

As I explained earlier, though, using these automated solutions is just a first step. You don’t just put up a website and expect Google and Yahoo! to rank you #1 for all of your products. You don’t just put up an ad on Yahoo! Search Marketing or Google Adwords and expect to get all the clicks and all the sales. Working with data feeds is no different. The most basic data feed optimization tip is to include as much data as possible in your data feed. Don’t just submit the minimum basic requirements or else your products won’t be found by shoppers browsing or searching.

Step 4: Analyze your results and refine your data feed. Some products will sell well on the shopping comparison engines. Some won’t. You will want to make sure you’re only listing the products that sell or you’ll rack up click costs producing a terrible return on investment.

Brian Smith
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Brian Smith runs SingleFeed, a self service data feed management, submission, and optimization system for small and medium sized merchants. He is also an Analyst for the shopping comparison engine industry through his blog, ComparisonEngines.com.

Update: 3/22/07–Internet Retailer posted an interesting story related to this topic about how LampsPlus is setting a minimum ROI threshold below which certain products are not fed to the shopping engines. This really ties into step 4 listed above and may actually be something you want to consider prior to submitting your feed. Read more.

Sunny working vacations part deux

Earlier I posted about joining us at the Internet Retailer conference in June. If you prefer a tropical destination then read the following post from Scott Sanfilippo, co-founder and President of Solid Cactus, a full-service web design company specializing in the development of Yahoo! Stores.–Paul

My screensaver shows scenes of sun-splashed beaches and tropical destinations, not snow. I am focused on…the Solid Cactus Boot Camp @ Sea 2007!

This time we’re taking to the high seas on what we call a “working vacation.”
Our next Boot Camp will be aboard “Disney Wonder®” from Disney Cruise Line®. We’ll embark on July 1st and stop at Nassau in the Bahamas, Disney’s private island Castaway Cay and celebrate the 4th of July at sea, fireworks included. We’ll return home July 5th.

In between island hopping, we’ve set aside July 4th as “Sea-minar” day. From 9am to 5pm we’ll have seminars running in three conference rooms on different topics. Interested in learning about search engine marketing? How about incorporating rich media into your website? If you’re a Cactus Complete Commerce user, we have six seminars to teach you the ins and outs of the system. We have a total of 18 different seminars available.

All work and no play make us dull, so there are plenty of things to see and do aboard “Disney Wonder”. For adults there’s non-stop entertainment including Broadway-style shows, dancing, night clubs and babysitting. Yes, babysitting! After all, this is a Disney cruise and kids are not only welcome, they’ll be busy.

Our Boot Camps are designed to get e-commerce store owners together to network, pick each other’s brains and hopefully walk away with information that can help their business back home. This event is no different. Although there is a lot of fun involved, the Solid Cactus team will be on hand not only during the seminars, but during all four days so you can schedule one-on-ones with our experts. Whether you’re an e-commerce veteran or a seasoned pro, this is one event you don’t want to miss.

If I’ve sparked your interest–call me. That’s all! Call 1.888.361.9814 ext. 7100 and I’ll answer your questions and take your booking right over the phone. It’s important that you act quickly as a limited number of staterooms are available and are sure to fill up fast. Prices start at $1029 per person and include everything but airfare.

A complete itinerary including seminar descriptions is available at http://events.solidcactus.com

See you onboard!

Scott Sanfilippo
Guest blogger forYahoo! Small Business