May 2009 Release Notes

As Memorial Day festivities were winding down earlier this week, here at Yahoo! Small Business, we were keeping the festive spirit alive with the release of several new feature enhancements for your Yahoo! stores. With some of these enhancements having been on the “wish list” of many merchants for awhile, we hope you’ll be just as happy to start using them with your store operations, as we are to tell you about them.

Customize buyer-facing order number prefixes

By default, order numbers displayed to your store customers are prefixed with your store ID. For example, if a customer’s order number is 792, and your store ID is yhst-12345678911011, the order number is displayed to the customer as yhst-12345678911011-792 on order confirmation and order status pages in checkout, in order and shipment confirmation emails, and on printed order materials (order invoice and packing slip).

Now, you can customize what comes before the order number, using the new “Order Number Prefix” field in the Shipment & Order Status section of Store Manager. If your store name is “Widget World” and you want to replace the store ID in the order number with “widget-world,” you can now go right ahead. Your customized order number prefix will be shown in the buyer-facing locations noted above. (Merchants should note that for printed order materials, the custom order number prefix will appear on materials printed to PDF, but not on materials printed to HTML.)

Replace your store ID in order numbers using the "Order Number Prefix" field.

Custom order number prefix displayed in checkout.

Specify a sender name for order and shipment status emails

Order and shipment status emails use a default sender name in the “From” field, pulled from the “Title” variable in your Store Manager. Should you wish to customize the “From” field, you may do so using the “Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails” field in the Shipment & Order Status section of Store Manager. So if your “Title” variable was “All Paws Up – Pet Supplies for the Pampered Puppy,” and you wanted your email sender name to simply be “All Paws Up,” you can change this using the “Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails” field.

Customize the sender name used for order and shipment confirmation emails using the "Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails" field.

If you haven’t yet enabled order and shipment status emails and want to learn more about setting these up, please see our “Configuring shipping and order confirmation emails” help page.

Limit shipping address state selection in checkout

Some merchants sell products that can only be shipped to specific states. For example, a store that sells wine must honor state shipping laws that restrict wine from being shipped to certain states. Other times, you may wish to only accept orders from within the continental U.S. Previously, you needed to ensure you had no shipping rates that would allow these orders to be placed, and your checkout may have shown U.S. territories as well as states.

To address these needs, we’ve made it possible to limit which states a buyer can select when providing shipping address information during checkout. When a merchant has defined specific ship-to states in the Foreign Orders section of Store Manager, buyers will be required to select a state from a drop-down list that lists the selected states only (or the selected states and all Canadian provinces, if the store also ships to Canada).

Drop-down list of selected ship-to states in checkout.

To find out how to use this new feature, please see our online help page.

New “Minimum Purchase Includes” option in Coupon Manager

While shoppers enjoy store discounts, it’s important for your business to maintain certain margins when offering these discounts. Coupon Manager’s target items capability allows you to choose which store items to include in a coupon offer, so you can avoid discounts on low-margin items. In combination with this, you can also require that a minimum purchase amount be met in order to redeem a coupon, which helps you maintain certain margins – even when a discount has been applied.

Now, when a coupon includes target items, you can also choose which store items will count toward the required minimum purchase amount: only those target items included in the coupon offer, or all items in an order. When creating or editing a coupon that requires a minimum purchase amount, you can set this option in the “Minimum Purchase Includes” section of the Create/Edit Coupon screen. By choosing to include only items included in the coupon offer, low-margin products that may be excluded from the offer can also be excluded from counting toward the required minimum purchase amount.

"Minimum Purchase Includes" option in Coupon Manager.

By default, this option is set to include all store items. Merchants should note that when editing coupons, the option to count only target items included in a coupon offer toward the minimum purchase amount will be disabled if target items have not yet been defined.

PayPal Express Checkout: shipping address options

We’ve made some changes to your PayPal Express Checkout options, to address common questions about the shipping address settings. First, the “Allow Override” and “Match Address” labels have been replaced with “Buyer-specified Address” and “Replace With PayPal Address,” to better reflect what each option means:

• Buyer-specified Address – Always use the shipping address entered by the buyer during checkout, even if the address is not associated with the buyer’s PayPal account.

• Replace With PayPal Address – Replace the address entered by the buyer during checkout with the address from their PayPal account (note that the buyer may choose to modify this address upon returning to checkout from PayPal).

PayPal Shipping Address settings and new "Flag Address Mismatch" option.

With either setting, you may now opt to flag orders with a shipping address that does not match the buyer’s PayPal address, using the “Flag Address Mismatch (no auto-capture of order)” option. These orders will be marked as “pending review” in Order Manager, and auto-capture of funds for these orders will not occur. Merchants can then review the order, and choose to manually capture funds, or to cancel the order.

We look forward to bringing you several more releases this year, and continue our wish to be a partner in your online success. If you have any comments about these feature enhancements, or other recent releases, be sure to let us know.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Free OneTwoPunch Webinar: Using Cross-Sell to Increase Sales

On Wednesday, May 27, 2009, from 2-3 p.m. EDT, join Scott Smigler of Exclusive Concepts and Eric Yonge of EY Studios as they host a free OneTwoPunch webinar aimed at helping you learn how to increase store sales using advanced Cross-Sell features. Joining them will be Laurie Briggs, Sr. Product Manager for Yahoo! Small Business, whose name many of you may recognize from several Cross-Sell articles previously posted to the blog.

Webinar topics will include:

• Improvement to sales as a result of using Cross-Sell
• How Cross-Sell works
• How merchants use Cross-Sell

Register for the webinar.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Yahoo! Web Analytics: New Look, More Reports, Enhanced Features

Have you checked your Yahoo! Web Analytics reports this week? If so, you may have noticed some improvements and enhancements to the Yahoo! Web Analytics reporting interface, along with new demographics and interest groups reports, segmentation, and filters; a demographics and interest groups dashboard; the ability to create more scheduled reports; and the addition of custom fields along with a greater number of actions (more on that in a bit).

New Yahoo! Web Analytics reports, segmentation, and filters

How well do you know your site visitors? Probably not as well as you’re about to. Now you can get even closer to your current and potential customers, with more detailed demographics and interest group reporting. Next time you’re using Yahoo! Web Analytics, remember to check out these reports, most of which are also included in the new demographics dashboard:

• Age report – breaks down the age of visitors to your site in the following categories: under 17, 18-34, 35-54, and 55+.
• Gender report – breaks down the gender of visitors to your site as male, female, or unknown.
• Age & Gender report – contains cross-tabbed age and gender information (e.g., 18-34 female).
• Interest Categories report – shows the top interest categories of your site visitors.
• Y! Properties of Interest report – shows the top 20 Yahoo! properties also visited by your site visitors.

Yahoo! Web Analytics demographics dashboard

You can also apply age, gender, interest categories, and Y! properties of interest segmentation and cross-reference filtering to your reports. This information can help you with demographic targeting of Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns on search or content networks, and of AdWords campaigns on content networks. Learn about report segmentation and cross-reference filters.

More scheduled reports

Previously, you could schedule up to three reports to be delivered via email or FTP on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. As of this week, you can create up to 10 scheduled reports to better help you keep tabs on your site activity, and to help you with planning promotions or fine-tuning marketing campaigns. For example, if you evaluate your search campaigns and campaign spend once a week – say, every Tuesday – you may want a report delivered every Monday of top performing campaigns for the previous week.

Get into the action(s), and introducing custom fields

When Yahoo! Web Analytics was first released for Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store accounts, you could define up to nine custom actions to manually include in your site tracking. With this latest release, you may now define up to 50 actions. Learn how to define and track actions.

We also offer limited support for creating and tracking up to 38 custom fields. You can use custom fields to add specific reporting categories to the reporting structures already available in the system. Merchants should note that custom fields require manual setup and page tagging. We’ll soon be providing a Merchant Solutions-specific help page where you can learn more about custom fields and how to integrate them.

Digging into your data

The information available in your analytics reports can play a major role in helping you increase your store’s sales and revenue, along with the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. If you’re not sure where to begin, or if you’ve enabled Yahoo! Web Analytics and are looking for help and training materials, there are several resources available to you:

• Our online help center offers a number of help articles that take you through enabling Yahoo! Web Analytics for your store, customizing tracking code, using key reports and features, and common troubleshooting questions.

• MarketMotive offers a free 30-minute video showing you “4 Quick Ways to Improve Your Store,” using information from your analytics reports. This video tutorial is part of a full Yahoo! Web Analytics course, which covers important topics such as actionable reports, key performance indicators (KPIs), segmentation ideas, campaign configuration, custom reports, and more.

  
  MarketMotive’s free Yahoo! Web Analytics training video

  The complete course is available for $199, and MarketMotive is offering a 10% discount to the first 2,100 merchants who register using coupon code YMRK3YWTEN. Find out more about MarketMotive’s Yahoo! Web Analytics training.

• For merchants interested in Yahoo! Web Analytics consultations, several Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer partners offer consulting services. For a list of these developers, please see our Yahoo! Web Analytics training and consulting page.

If you’re a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant and haven’t yet enabled Yahoo! Web Analytics for your store, we strongly encourage you to do so. The information in your reports can provide you with important knowledge and insights that are key to your store’s success.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Free OneTwoPunch webinar: International SEO techniques, live site review, and more!

On Wednesday, April 22, from 2-3 p.m. EDT, join Eric Yonge of EYStudios and Scott Smigler of Exclusive Concepts as they host the next OneTwoPunch live webinar. Learn about international search engine optimization techniques, watch a live site review of home storage and organization products store SpaceSavers.com, and check out some new Yahoo! Store innovations from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer partner KingWebmaster.

This webinar is free. Register now.