Measuring Cross-Sell Performance and Increasing Flexibility

When we launched enhancements to Cross-Sell last fall, there were some features we wanted to deliver but could not. Since the launch, we’ve also received feedback from merchants requesting some refinements. With this release, we’re introducing new Cross-Sell reporting, custom pricing labels, and changes to the cart display.

Cross-Sell Reporting

For merchants using the latest version of Cross-Sell, there are six new graphs available in the Graphs section of Store Manager. These graphs allow you to view orders and revenue from auto-suggest, merchant created rules, or the two types of cross-sell combined. With this insight into cross-sell performance, you can now test using each type of cross-sell to determine which one works best for your site. For auto-suggestions, note that the more traffic and sales you have, the more data the auto-suggestions have to work with, so if you’re not using auto-suggest now you may want to revisit it as your store grows. In order to ensure that all cross-sell data is properly collected, a one time publish of Order Settings is needed once the new graphs are available. Please note it can take up to 48 hours for cross-sell statistics to be compiled and reflected in these new reports (e.g. cross-sell driven purchases made on Wednesday will show up in the graphs by Saturday).

Pricing Labels

Some of the feedback we received on the cross-sell addition to product pages pointed out that the pricing labels were confusing to shoppers when products had sale prices but not cross-sell prices. We agree, and we also recognize that each store has its own needs. While, we will continue to provide default labels (which now distinguish between sale price and cross-sell discount price to clear up that confusion), you can also customize all the pricing labels for price, sale price, and cross-sell discount price in product pages and in the cart. Order Settings must be published the first time new labels are created for the labels to take effect.

Cart Display

We also fixed an issue that affected cross-sell appearance in the cart. Cross-sell products once again have their name and info beside them, rather than below them.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

March 2008 Release Notes

Last week we announced our latest infrastructure improvements, and this week we are happy to announce the latest product features to be released. I will outline some of the new features in this post, but others will be addressed in a separate follow on post coming shortly after this one. So without further ado, here are features we released tonight:

American Express CID Codes

Merchants now have the option to process CID codes for shoppers paying with American Express. First Data Merchant Services (FDMS) recently added support for American Express CID (Card Identification) codes and we have updated Checkout Manager to allow for displaying this field and passing the value through FDMS to American Express.

Merchants who would like to use the CID code when accepting American Express will need to contact American Express directly to enable processing of the code and then publish your order settings. If your orders show a response code of “P” (Not Processed) then American Express has not enabled CID support for your merchant account yet. Please consult our Risk Tools help for more information about this feature.

Default Product Image Format Selection

Ever wonder why your product images may look different from the original image after uploading? Currently in the Store Editor, if you upload images larger than the values specified in your Image variables for product images, your original image is resized and converted to GIF format. With our upcoming release there will be two new variables added which allow you to control the default file format for resized images. This allows you the flexibility to choose the format that best meets your needs, including GIF, JPEG, or PNG.

You can also choose a default value for images generated by the Store Editor for navigation buttons or display text; this is more commonly used in the 2.0 Editor templates that generate images for side navigation buttons. The default setting of GIF will remain so no changes will be made automatically to your images. You can find these new variables in the Image Dimensions section of the Variables page. For more information please refer to Help.

View by Specific Date Range

We have added a date range option to the Page Views, Sales, References, and Searches reports. With this feature if you are running a short term promotion that launches on a specific day and runs for a specific period, you can set the date ranges to correspond to that period and view and export the results to help determine the impact for that period. Likewise, if you make a major change to your site, such as a redesign or change to checkout, you can run two reports with the date ranges set before and after the date of the change to help determine what the impact may have been.

Two Other Changes for Cross-Sell

We have also made improvements to our Cross-Sell Manager to provide merchants who have this feature with the flexibility and insight into cross-sell performance they have requested. We will dedicate a separate blog post just to these improvements, but here is a quick preview of the changes:

• Customizable labels for price, sale price and cross-sell discount on product and cart page cross-sell listings. Consult Cross-Sell help for more details.
• New graphs available in the Graphs page to show the performance of automated rules, manual (merchant created) rules, and both combined so merchants can decide on where to prioritize their cross-sell efforts.

So look for another post which will get into all of the details for the improved Cross-Sell features shortly. We look forward to bringing you many more releases this year and continue our wish to be a true partner in your online success.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business