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

Yahoo! Store Infrastructure Improvements

Here in Small Business, we’ve been making improvements to our systems that we’d like to share with you. Merchants often ask about how we preserve their store data, and rightly so. In addition to regular backups, copying data within the primary data center, and replicating data to a remote data center in a different geographic location, going forward your store’s data will also be published to multiple data centers simultaneously. This has the following benefits:

• Similar to our image-caching technology, which uses a content delivery network, shopper requests for your store’s pages will now be served by the closest available data center to the shopper. This should improve page serving times and the overall reliability of shoppers interacting with your site.
• Should a major event such as a natural disaster occur and one data center becomes unavailable, the other data center can service all requests with limited impact to your shoppers. Previously a major data center outage would mean bringing the other data center online before being able to service requests.

We’ve also made improvements to our overall network architecture. Key benefits include:

• More than double the order-taking capacity for our checkout systems.
• Double the front-end serving capacity, allowing us to handle twice as much traffic to our page serving systems.
• Improved ability to quickly add capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic.

The needs of our merchants are important to us. We remain committed to continually improving our systems so we can meet these needs, now and in the future.

Sheridan Rawlins
Yahoo! Small Business

Yahoo! Small Business Follow Up

We’ve heard you and we’ve been hearing from our merchant partners since Monday, and I want to let you know what happened earlier this week and what we’re doing about it.

On Monday, and for a very short time yesterday, unusual service interruptions affected transactions in Yahoo! Merchant Solutions/Yahoo! Stores.

After an investigation, we learned that the specific servers affected were the Shopping Cart database servers that handle cart contents for each shopper. New servers were added to the Shopping Cart database during our pre-holiday planning to manage the projected increase in transaction volume. When the holiday traffic surged, the hardware and software settings caused these servers to experience delays when customers added items to the Shopping Cart to complete checkout. When delays exceeded time limits, customers saw error messages stating that the servers had timed out (were not responding).

On Thursday, the service interruption occurred between 10:13 a.m. and 10:25 a.m. PT. During this time, merchants’ sites could not be accessed by shoppers.

After investigating the issue on Thursday, we found that this interruption occurred due to a network configuration issue resulting from new server capacity that was added for the holiday shopping season.

Immediately upon identification of both of these issues, our team worked hard to improve the situation as quickly as possible, and systems are now performing as expected.

These service interruptions were unrelated to our October feature release.

We fixed the problems as quickly as possible, and we are continuing to make improvements to our systems including the addition of new hardware and system maintenance conducted on November 28. We will continue to post information about ongoing activities at our system status page http://updates.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/.

We have apologized to our merchant partners for the impact that this service interruption had on their business and their customers at this busy time of year. As a token of our commitment to them, we have communicated with them our intent to waive all sales transaction fees for the month of November.

The success of our merchants’ business is extremely important to us, and we are committed to work as hard as we can, over and above the efforts already underway, to avoid such issues in the future.

Rich Riley
SVP Online Channel Division, Yahoo!