Yahoo! Small Business Awards Grants to Women Entrepreneurs

Back in March, Yahoo! Small Business and Carolyn Kepcher (entrepreneur and former star of NBC’s "The Apprentice") announced "Seeds for Success," a new grant program for women entrepreneurs. Out of more than 5,500 submissions, Yahoo! and Kepcher selected three finalists. Each of the finalists will receive $20,000 business grants, $5,000 in web site and online marketing consulting from Yahoo! Small Business partners Exclusive Concepts, Fast Pivot, and EYStudios, and one-on-one mentoring from leading business experts.

The three grant recipients are:

• Karla Duncan, pediatric speech pathologist and founder and president of Head2Toe Publications, a developer of toys and educational materials for special needs children;
• Abby Port, founder and CEO of Red Koala, which will offer customizable art for home décor on its Yahoo! Small Business site;
• Dana Rubinstein, co-founder of Dapple, which will produce earth-friendly and baby-safe cleaning supplies for babies’ hands, toys, and feeding equipment such as bottles and sippy cups.

Earlier this week, Kepcher wrote a blog post for Yahoo! Anecdotal, the Yahoo! corporate blog, where she shared her thoughts on why the Seeds for Success program is important to her. Her post also gives an overview of the program’s fifteen mentors, and the finalists they’ll be working with. Read Carolyn Kepcher’s post to Yahoo! Anecdotal.

And, don’t forget to stop by the Seeds for Success web site, where you can follow along as Duncan, Port, and Rubinstein use their business grants, consulting services, and mentors’ advice to accelerate their businesses. Whoever progresses her business the most over the next six months will win the $10,000 grand prize. What these entrepreneurs learn along the way could help you grow your business, too!

Melissa Chaika Sobel and Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Join Yahoo! at the E-Commerce Summit in New Orleans April 23rd & 24th

Is your business optimized? Are you working with the best vendors? Have you negotiated the best services and rates? Do you ever really know?!

It’s tough to know the all answers, but a good business manager should always make the effort. Yahoo! Store is working with an educational trade association of small business owners, called the E-Commerce Merchants (www.ecommercemerchants.org) to help Yahoo! Store customers improve their online sales strategy.

E-Commerce Merchants is a network of hundreds of small business owners around the country who collaborate to improve their businesses. By working together they are able to share ideas, tips, suggestions and resources on what is working for them and what they need help with. The group has been around for a few years and has amassed a fantastic portfolio of business best-practices and industry contacts for its members, many of whom provide discounted pricing to the members.

This trade association offers periodic webinars that allow you to interact with industry leaders on a range of important topics as well as in-person networking and educational presentations at their bi-annual E-commerce Summits. Join me at this year’s Summit in New Orleans April 23rd & 24th as I present on a special Yahoo! Store panel with Yahoo! Partner, Shawna Fennell of 1 Choice 4 Your Store.

Yahoo! has 25 FREE VIP passes for you to attend the New Orleans E-commerce Summit on April 23rd and 24th! Passes are available first-come, first-served. To register please use this link:
www.ecmta.org/ecommerce-summit-spring-2008/index.cfm?code=YHOO

(This is a very special offer, so to ensure no seats go empty a $99 deposit is required during registration. You will be refunded $99 when you arrive at the event in New Orleans.)

Looking forward to seeing you in New Orleans!

Mike Ober
Yahoo! Small Business

Catalog Request Released for Checkout Manager

Next time you’re in Checkout Manager, you may notice some new additions. Page Configuration now has tabs for "Catalog Request" and "Catalog Request Confirmation," there’s a few new Checkout Buttons, and Advanced Settings includes a section for enabling or disabling Catalog Request. All this can only mean one thing – we’re happy to announce the release of the Catalog Request feature for Checkout Manager.

You can use Catalog Request to let customers sign up for catalogs and other items, such as special product alerts, other notifications and announcements, mailing lists, and email newsletters. If your store offers more than one catalog selection, you can let customers choose which items they’d like to receive by adding fields to the optional "Catalog Selection" section of your form.

Unlike the older version of Catalog Request (used with Order Forms), new forms created in Checkout Manager will have the same look and feel as the rest of your checkout pages. You can use Checkout Manager to create, customize, and preview page titles, page messages, sections, fields, and display options for both your Catalog Request form and confirmation page. The Enable/Disable Catalog Request option lets you choose when to activate Catalog Request for Checkout Manager in your store.

Merchants who use Catalog Request with Order Forms may like to know that moving to Checkout Manager will not disable your current Catalog Request pages. You may continue to use these pages until you choose to activate a new form in Checkout Manager. If you’ve already moved to Checkout Manager to take advantage of its added customization options and features, you can now create a Catalog Request form that matches the rest of your checkout pages.

For more information about Catalog Request, including how to create, customize and enable your form, how to link to your form, and how to receive catalog requests, please see our help pages.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Better insights into your traffic and conversion rates

Ever wonder what percent of visitors are first time vs. returning visitors and the difference in sales between the two? Ever wonder which keywords bring in traffic but not sales? Ever wonder what you would do if you knew how your ad campaigns were performing in real-time and were able to make immediate changes to improve performance?

To answer those questions on Yahoo! in the past, you needed to use a 3rd party analytics solution with often complex integrations to ensure proper tracking. Today, Yahoo! announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire the analytics platform of IndexTools, a leading web analytics provider.

We are planning to incorporate this technology into our product offering after completing the acquisition, in order to provide you with not only the ability to track, compare, and view reports across key metrics, but more importantly, to segment and analyze data to understand what’s working well on your site and what’s not working. You don’t need more reports—you need actionable insights that can drive better traffic through natural search or search marketing optimization and improve conversion rates.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business