Official Yahoo! Store Blog tips and tricks for ecommerce success

What’s that on my page?

September 25, 2007 | In News & Announcements |

Recently, you may have noticed the addition of a small piece of JavaScript appearing on your store pages. I wanted to take a moment to explain why it’s there and also to let you know about a few things you can look forward to before the holidays.

First, we’ll be introducing an enhanced version of our Cross-Sell tool that will greatly reduce the amount of manual effort required to setup and maintain cross-sell in your store. Essentially, we’re taking our existing cross-sell engine to the next level by creating an automated recommendation engine that utilizes Yahoo!’s advanced behavioral targeting technology. You’ve likely seen a similar feature on sites like Amazon where looking at one book shows you “People that bought this book also purchased these other books”.

This new feature will enable you to cross-sell relevant items on both your product pages and shopping cart automatically. These recommendations will be based on what buyers have actually purchased or viewed in your store (no more guess work). Our goal here is very simple – help your shoppers find more of what they are looking for and increase your store sales.

Second, we’re building a tool to help you better understand what keywords are converting into sales in your store. Today, it’s a bit of a treasure hunt trying to figure out which keywords (both paid and organic) are leading to sales. Our new keyword tool will greatly simplify this process by providing a ranked list of keywords that are converting (found in referral URLs from search and shopping engines for completed orders) in your store. It will show you not only what is converting but will also help you understand which keywords lead to which products. These keywords will be easily exported for use with your favorite SEM tools and we’re sure this new tool will help you drive relevant traffic to your store, whether through using these keywords on your pages for search engine optimization, or bidding on the keywords with pay-per-click ads.

Lastly, for those merchants that are using our Real-Time Order Posting feature in conjunction with an external order management system (such as OrderMotion or StoneEdge Order Manager), we’re creating an advanced set of open APIs. These new APIs will allow external systems to interact with Yahoo! Store for both payment settlement and order updates. Initially, these APIs will be released with limited availability to select customers and partners, but will be opened up for general use over time. We’re excited to be opening up the platform in this way and look forward to sharing more soon.

So, back to the small piece of JavaScript code that we added to your pages. Basically, it’s a necessary component of our system and is required for us to continue to provide you more advanced, customized functionality. Yes, we’re fixing the script so that it validates properly. We will also move it to the bottom of the page to eliminate any concerns about page load performance. You can also be assured that this additional code does not in any way negatively affect your search engine ranking. Search engine spiders disregard all code within script tags, so this addition will have no impact on your rankings.

As always, it is much more important to enter good (original) descriptions for every one of your products, since this text is actively crawled by search engine spiders. One more thing while we’re talking about search engines - please be sure to enable your store’s XML and sitemap! This allows others to easily find your site and even gives us the permission to get you more traffic (more on this in another post).

Stay tuned for more information on each of the above enhancements. We’re looking forward to a busy and successful holiday season.

Jimmy Duvall
Yahoo! Small Business

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Wow.. these are all *huge* improvements. Any chance , the “These keywords will be easily exported for use with your favorite SEM tools” will be able to export Apache style logs?

The lack of true logs is really one of the biggest downfalls with running a Y! Store.

As for the APIs. Thank you! We would love to be part of the beta if at all possible.

Comment by Jordan Glasner — September 25, 2007 #
These are all GREAT new features.

I’m glad you’re fixing the JavaScript.
Thanks

Comment by bobsc — September 25, 2007 #
Great additions. I second the request about the logs, it is a big gap.

But the biggest gripe for me that is easily fixable: Get our sales out of the home page of the store manager. I don’t want people who don’t need to know that having it be front and center. A longtime gripe from many store owners. And so easily fixed.

Comment by Rick S — September 25, 2007 #
Ok….so, if it’s not broken…. I don’t see the JavaScript anywhere, or I don’t know what to look for, or not look for. What am I looking for … or not ?

Comment by Pat — September 25, 2007 #
Excellent news all around. I look forward to the working cross-sell feature as soon as possible. Store owners are going to want to have as much time to test before the holidays as possible.

Comment by Andrew — September 25, 2007 #
This is a great step forward!

Comment by Kurt — September 25, 2007 #
Thanks!

Slightly offtopic, but is there planned support for php5 in the future for merchant solution customers?

sorry about posting this here, but I can not find an appropriate forum/blog elsewhere…

Comment by wayne — September 26, 2007 #
Rick and Jordan–
What problem are you trying to solve for with logs? Guessing you may want to use a log analyzer program for statistics but those seem to be outdated compared to page tagging solutions so trying to understand your needs.

Rick–providing more customizable access levels is on our feature list, may not be the top feature requested but certainly on there.

Bob–thanks for the feedback (as always)

Andrew and Kurt–glad you are looking forward to this. Andrew the best part of this is if enabled, the cross-sell engine will generate automated cross-sell rules. So instead of having only a limited number of rules due to the time it takes for creating them, you can now have the best cross-sell rules based on order history and click paths. I agree that merchants will want to test these though to see if they should keep their manual rules in some cases (high margin items) vs. using the automated rules.

Wayne–I’ll check with the Web Hosting team to see where this may be on the roadmap.

Paul

Comment by pboisver — September 26, 2007 #
Re: Logs..

I want to be able to use analytics software such as Clicktracks w/o having to resort to installing another js beacon on the site.

Comment by Jordan Glasner — September 26, 2007 #
Pat–check your section and item pages to see the code.

Paul

Comment by pboisver — September 26, 2007 #
[…] you want to read the whole story, check it out here. Filed under Blog by Britt Permalink • Print • Email […]

Pingback by Cross-Selling in Yahoo Stores is Getting a Facelift! — September 27, 2007 #
Paul - When do you expect the new cross-sell tool to be available?

-Chad

Comment by Chad — September 27, 2007 #
Is there a link to documentation on the API so we could build our own custom apps?

Thanks,
Kam

Comment by Kam — September 29, 2007 #
Kam
The APIs are not released yet so no documentation is available. They will release to select partners first for load testing and optimizing purposes (as mentio ned in the post) before being opened fully.

Paul

Comment by pboisver — September 29, 2007 #
Could that JavaScript be put in an external file?

Comment by bobsc — October 8, 2007 #
What is the expected date for the API release. Can we participate in the initial beta testing. Would love to help out.

Comment by Manish Jha — October 8, 2007 #
Bob–While externalizing is the typical best practice, not sure if the JavaScript in this case needs has to be inline. As part of moving the code to the bottom of the page, we will review this.

Manish–Thanks for the interest in the APIs. The first release will be prior to the holidays but it will only go out to a few order management vendors at first–not available to the public at this time.

Paul

Comment by pboisver — October 8, 2007 #
1: Customizable access would be great. But an easy fix to many owner’s gripes would just be to pull those two graphs out of the main page of the manager. Too visible.

2: Wish you would implement this in July/August. Yahoo really doesn’t listen to our requests for a code freeze and no more features this time of year. We’ve had an “October surprise” every year. Don’t test this stuff out during our busiest time of year. There are always kinks.

Comment by Rick S — October 8, 2007 #
Rick–Point taken but removing it may be a disservice to merchants that like a quick snapshot of these 2 metrics. Like all features, we will prioritze based on the number of requests and the impact to the business–more granular control over all access including stats is definitely on the short list.

Belive me–if we could fit this into August we would have but this is a sizable project with plenty of development time required. I would disagree completely with your statement that Yahoo! does not listen. The code freeze was a direct result of merchant feedback and there was no major issue last October so not quite accurate saying “every year”. If there is any issue with quality that may impact sales, the new code would be disabled. We absolutely want to make the holiday season as smooth as possible.

Paul

Comment by pboisver — October 8, 2007 #
By the posts above, the “code freeze” isn’t one…

The code is being worked on. “I wanted to take a moment to explain why it’s there and also to let you know about a few things you can look forward to before the holidays.”

So the order management API stuff is being beta tested. The other features like cross sell are not yet available but will before the holidays.

My calendar says October. Doesn’t Yahoo’s? More things are still being rolled out. How is this a code freeze?

The features sound interesting, looking forward to checking them out. But they should have been done a month or two ago, not still in progress for an October (or later) rollout.

Comment by Rick S — October 9, 2007 #
Thanks for the great features. Yahoo! Store rocks!!!

Comment by The Dog Clothing & Dog Collar Company — October 9, 2007 #
Rick–We have October on our calendar over here as well so we are in sync on that. The disconnect may be in what you think the code freeze period is vs. what it actually is. For the last 3 years, we do not release later than mid-November or any of December. If you have references to an October code freeze please let me know where it is so we can correct that. The purpose as you know is to prevent changes that may disrupt the busy holiday shopping season. This code freeze is just one small part of the planning, testing, monitoring, and roll out of new servers to handle the holiday sales rush that happens each year.

Paul

Comment by pboisver — October 10, 2007 #
The disconnect is apparently between what Yahoo thinks is a reasonable time to stop work and what I and many other store owners do.

“We do not release later than mid-November or any of December”. Jeez, I would hope that Yahoo isn’t adding features at that time of year. That’s a no-brainer in the extreme.

We, the store owners, have frequently requested that we not have “October surprises”. Functionality IMHO should be rolled out no later than September. There are always bugs, performance tweaking and other gremlins that need to be worked out with any rollout. No need for them to be debugged during October/November, our busiest season (and not just in sales, in working to get ready for the peak weeks). It’s also just one less thing for the techs to worry about as they do their prep for the holidays. Rolling out this cool-sounding cross sell feature makes much more sense in the summer when traffic is lighter and the stakes are lower. Then, when the peak season comes the kinks will hopefully had time to be addressed.

Most store owners are more worried about performance and stability this time of year than a new feature we might not even have time to try.

Comment by Rick — October 11, 2007 #
Paul - Great news! When do you expect the new cross-sell tool to be available? Also, will there be a reporting tool that is more robust then what is currently available for the manual cross-sell feature? Thanks!

Comment by Norm — October 17, 2007 #
Norm,

We are releasing as soon as possible–sorry I cannot provide a more specific date. Reporting improvements within cross-sell will not be in this release but that and other improvements to cross-sell are under consideration currently.

Paul

Comment by pboisver — October 17, 2007 #
[…] In his September 25 post, Jimmy Duvall outlines the benefits of these upgrades, specifically: […]

Pingback by Yahoo! Stores Introducing Cross-Sell and Keyword Enhancements for the Holidays : The FastPivot.com Blog — October 19, 2007 #
Your promise that yahoo will move the javascript code to the bottom has still not been fulfilled and the javascript is still not valid…
the javascript is causing an increase in load time and might be a factor in SEO as well, you can never know how google would interpret the script.
so please, place the code in the bottom!

Comment by amitai — October 21, 2007 #
The code will be moved to the bottom with our upcoming release as promised.–Paul

Comment by pboisver — October 21, 2007 #
Is there anyway we can participate in beta testing or have access to API documentation for credit card processing.

Comment by Manish — January 9, 2008 #
[…] latest release is very exciting for a variety of reasons. For one, the redesign of the old, clunky, cross-sell […]

Pingback by Yahoo! Small Business Update | PostHits.com — January 15, 2008 #

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