Zappos CEO Bares His “Sole” and Shares His Lessons

I always think it’s better to learn from the mistakes of others, than to make the mistakes yourself (unless you’re one of those people that really need that first-hand experience to learn something). With that in mind, I thought I would pass along a link to a great write-up by Melissa Dowling available at Multichannel Merchant of some tips recently passed along by Tony Hsieh of Zappos. The top-tier shoe site CEO shared his top 10 lessons from eight years in business during a recent presentation at the eTail 2007 conference.

Lessons include:

• viewing customer service not as a cost center but a profit center
• the value of returning customers to your business
• the impact of word of mouth advertising

You may already know some of these lessons, but at the very least it’s nice to see how successful e-tailers view their business (and that they worked through the same issues you may now be facing). Read the full write-up.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Solid Cactus Boot Camp Event

Attention Merchants! Solid Cactus, a Yahoo! Small Business partner, will be hosting their third annual 3-day boot camp from October 10-12th in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Sessions will cover

• Email, search, and affiliate marketing
• Web site features to help your products sell
• Tips on how to write good content
• Advice on how to provide good customer service, and
• Information on using shopping comparison engines

Think of it as taking a vacation not from your business, but for your business. Visit the Solid Cactus Boot Camp site for full agenda, hotel, and registration information.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

That’s What Friends Are For

Your online store is built, and the virtual shelves are stocked. You have a payment processor, and your tax and shipping rules are set up. You’re now officially open for business. Great… now what? While the obvious next step might be to market your store, what’s not clear is who to market to, and how to do it.

The Simple Promotional Email tool

Pay-per-performance marketing tactics like Yahoo! Search Marketing are extremely effective at delivering visitors to your store immediately, but they also require financial investment that you might not be ready to make without knowing which of your products converts to sales the best.

What to do? Try out Simple Promotional Email, our latest marketing tool designed to help you attract visitors to your store and become more successful, even if you’re working within a shoestring budget.

The Simple Promotional Email tool allows you to easily create professional looking, visually rich emails to help promote your store. Included in the email are your branding elements (store name, URL, colors), product images, a personal message to customize, and a very strong incentive to shop at your store: a coupon! Coupon is one of the most effective promotional tools to help induce sales, and now this feature is available to all of our merchants.

For those of you who are thinking of using this tool for spamming…. DON’T! The Simple Promotional Email actually uses the Yahoo! mailing engine to send emails. In short, it will be as if you are sending the emails directly from your Yahoo! Mail account, or your Business Mail accounts. So don’t get yourself labeled as a spammer.

Remember that the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions license agreement explicitly forbids spamming. So please review Yahoo!’s Universal Anti-Spam Policy for anti-spamming guidelines.

The Simple Promotional Email tool is available for all Yahoo! merchants and is accessible from the Promote section of the Store Manager. For more information about the tool and how to use it, please visit our help section for Simple Promotional Email.

The grand opening of your store is an exciting occasion and it should be shared with friends, family and colleagues. Whether you are celebrating being open for business, or just want to advertise your summer sale, try out the Simple Promotional Email today . Don’t feel like the guy at the office who’s trying to push his kid’s candy bars by the water cooler. Think of yourself as the guy at the office who’s trying to push his kid’s candy bars online…. with a 15% off coupon.

Duncan Shen
Yahoo! Small Business