The one thing I was always jealous of were owners of really old Yahoo Stores or Legacy Stores as some call them. That was their order numbers were nice and neat. For example, if you were smart enough or lucky enough to get on a Yahoo platform long ago, your order numbers were typically your domain name and then the order number. So if would look something like this;

ytutorials-1096

Until recently, all the new Yahoo stores would get a really long order number that looks like this;

You know what I am talking about if you have ever had a customer call in to check on something and you ask them, instinctively, whats your order number? Then they reply with, hmmm must be this long number here, YST-318 bla bla bla and you stop them and go "Just give me the last 4-5 digits (everything after the last hypen)". Am I right?

Well I was probing around my store today and noticed something new that can be done to your store to get rid of all that!

In your store manager, goto the Order Settings and click on Shipment & Order Status (see image below)

Once here, you will see a spot for Order Number Prefix (see image below)

This particular example if from one of my stores that sells Medieval Swords and its called ReplicaDungeon.com so I used RD as my order prefix. Now when I get orders, they come in as RD-9543

Tell me that aint just cool?!

Have fun and hope to see you again soon.

If you own and operate a Yahoo Store, then you are probably already aware of the Final-text variable. Typically, I use this variable for adding all my little store icons down at the bottom of my pages. One of my stores sells neon open signs and I include my newsletter signup form, google ads, my trust seals, credit cards we accept, etc. (see image below)

For the Final-text variable, I use raw html code and paste it into the field in my store and by doing this, all of my store pages will feature the same thing at the bottom of the pages. This way I can simply update this one field and it will update on every page of my site. This saves me time and energy and puts information I want to showcase to my customers on every page.

OVERRIDE YAHOO STORE VARIABLES!

Now here is the cool part. Did you know you can override that variable on ANY page in your site? Thats right! While in your store editor, you can browse to any page in your site and click the edit button, then click override variable, then choose final-text. (see images below)

Now after you do this, you will have a custom area at the bottom of the page you are editing where you can completely change the Final-text area for that one page only. By doing this, for example on the site we sell neon signs, I have a different Final-text for my home page than I do for all my other pages. This way I control exactly what I want and where I want it.

This method for overriding variables can be done with tons of other stuff to. As you can see by the picture above, you can override availability of certain items or change the thumbnail picture sizes. Play around with this feature. Its a great little option for Yahoo Store owners.

If you were not aware, you can do a bulk upload of all your images for your Yahoo Store catalog. Of course, the only catch is that the image name must also be the same name as the ID in your store catalog. It can be a little daunting to if you are trying to have SEO friendly page names. Most of the time, your supplier will give you a file (if you are lucky) with their item number and the pictures are usually named the same as the item number. So you may have CB-123 as an item number with an image named CB-123.jpg which is perfect for easy uploading to your store. Once you have your catalog populated, you simply click on CONTROLS in advanced editor mode in your store editor. Once there you will see something like this…

All the images just need to be zipped up (I use Winzip) into zip files and uploaded using the Multiple Image Upload. If all your image names are exactly like your ID's in your Yahoo Store catalog, then your image will show up just right. Now, the fun part… did you know you can also do a bulk upload of the second images or Inset images in your store?

In order for this to work, you need to create a new column in your database (.csv file) called inset. In that column, you will list the name of the image but do not put the extension of the image. So basically no .gif or .jpg. After you do this, upload your .csv file using the database upload. Then put all those Inset images into a zip file and upload them using the Multple Image Upload like mentioned above.

Thats it! Now you can buik upload your main image AND your Inset images in your Yahoo Store! Quick and easy. 

PS - Rob Snell just emailed me to say "You can also upload custom-image fields the same way!

Ya know, this may sound a bit belittling but honestly…do your shoppers actually read? I ask this question because after having had ecommerce Yahoo stores for a few years now, its apparent to me that shoppers just don't read. For example, one of my sites that sells neon open signs, has a free shipping offer. All orders over $150 dollars get free shipping if they simply enter the coupon code "ship4free" at checkout. Its that simple…or so I thought. Whats so ironic is that I have it plastered all over the shopping cart pages. How can people actually miss this? See below…

Now don't get me wrong, this is actually kinda done on purpose. My site specifically states that the free shipping offer must be done online and by the person doing the ordering and that we cannot go back and substract the shipping later (which I do if they call me). The cool part is that since most people don't read, we actually get 2 out of 5 orders where people just did not enter then coupon code. Because of this, we make over a thousand dollars per month on this 1 site alone in just shipping charges. Since the price of shipping is already included in the sale price of the neon sign itself, its just extra money in our pocket for people that, well, just don't read or maybe they just don't care.

So the question remains…do shoppers actually read whats on your site? Based on our neon sign website, the answer is yea, about 70% of them do. The other 30% are either to lazy, spending someone elses money and don't care or still very shaky when it comes to online shopping. Either way or whatever reason it is, you can take advantage of these types of situations and not feel bad about it all.

Ya know, Yahoo has really done an outstanding job on their checkout process but you need to take it to another level. The checkout by itself is as plain and drab as it gets. For example, check out this store (http://buynselleverything.com/) and click on the View My Cart link at the top of the page. That is pretty much the stock version of the actual Yahoo shopping cart. Now ask yourself, why would you spend money on designing your logo, creating your site template, programming your store and then not spend as much time, energy and money into the one part of your Yahoo store that actually makes you money? Mind boggling aint it? And its not just them, this is all over the place. For example; 

http://www.furniture-zoo.com/
http://www.smallhandsrags.com/
http://www.theoriginalcushie.com/
http://www.globalgoddessbeauty.com/
http://www.ultimatefitnessgear.com/

And the list goes on and on and on. Its quite amazing actually. Imagine walking into a Belk to go shopping. You smell all the colognes and perfumes, stroll by the leather shoes and then into the men's department. You pick out an amazing blazer and ask to try it on. You head to the dressing rooms and slip the jacket on and stand in front of the mirror. You cannot believe how awesome this jacket makes you look so you decide to go ahead and make the purchase. You walk up to one of the associates and they direct you downstairs. You head downstairs where you see rust on the stair railings, pipes dripping water overhead and the lights are dull. You reach the checkout counter and are greeted by a guy that has not had a clean shave in 4 days, smells of tobacco, is missing 2 teeth and processes your credit card on an old slide machine.

Now I don't know about you but if something like that happens to me, I am leaving my stuff down in the basement and getting the hell outta there.

This is what you are putting your customers through when you don't make sure your checkout process is as good (if not better) than your main site. And the funny thing is, its only 350 dollars to customize your cart and if you cannot do it yourself, call me! I can do it for you.

Stop watching your customers abandon the shopping cart of your Yahoo Store. The features are there already, you just have to put them all to proper use.

If you want to see how a Yahoo Store checkout should look, here are a few of our stores.

http://www.replicadungeon.com/
http://www.brightneonsigns.com/
http://www.alchemydungeon.com/
http://www.ledsignworks.com/

Were you aware that your shoppers CAN use more than 1 single coupon code at checkout? Most people are simply not aware of this little feature but you can do it. For example, one of my Yahoo stores sell neon open signs and we offer free shipping for all orders over 150 dollars. We also have a newsletter that gives registrants a 5% off coupon code. So normally a shopper would plug in 1 of the coupon codes and it would calculate into their cart but what about the other one?

The answer is simple… your customers just need to add BOTH coupon codes at once separated by a comma. So if you have a coupon that is SHIP4FREE and one coupon code that is 5OFF, your customers would just need to plug in SHIP4FREE, 5OFF at the same time!

Simple little things can make a huge difference. Remember to post a note in your checkout areas so your customers understand how to use more than 1 coupon code at the same time…if you want to offer this type of thing.

It also works this way for multiple gift certificates. Hope this helps!

Well folks, turns out this is completely wrong. My sources lied to me because I just tried it and it definitely does not work so I am retracting my statements from above. Also, according to Yahoo, the above tactic is supposed to work for multiple gift certificates but that again, is false. What does work for multiple gift certificates is you enter the first certificate and hit apply and then you enter the second gift certificate (and so on) and hit apply and they total up correctly. Go figure, I thought I had a new trick for Yahoo store owners and it turns out to be bogus. O well, hopefully you still learned something from all this mess.

Ya know, its been said time and time again that we are in an economic crisis and the fact is…we are. But what can you do to make a difference? Experts continue to advise people to shop online to save time and money. No wear and tear on your car, less frequent gas fillups and no lines is why there has been an increase in online sales over these last 6 months or so.

We all know that traffic is the single most important thing for a successful online business so its your duty to take advantage of all the options your Yahoo Store can provide you with. Coupons are a great way to offer FREE SHIPPING to your customers. You can add a coupon code and tell people that if they purchase X amount you will ship it for free. Just enter the coupon code at checkout.

Its important in these times with more online shoppers that you get an edge over your competition. If you don't do it, I promise you someone else will. Also be extremely public about your shipping offers. Add an image to your site that specifies that you offer dicounts and free shipping. Don't assume your customers will see it or search for it. You only have 1 shot at keeping your customers and getting them to buy from you so don't leave them wondering.

So, like many of you have already noticed, Yahoo increased their hosting fees. Starting Oct 1, 2008, those stores that are on the Standard and Legacy accounts will see a 33% increase in their monthly fee. From 99.99 per month to 129.95 per month. And here's a little shocker for ya… check out their info page http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/plans.php and you will not see a price change here. So guess what that means? All potentially new Yahoo store owners will get caught in a trap. Can you imagine doing your research, choosing Yahoo Merchant Solutions as their ecommerce solution of choice and within 30 days already get hit with a price increase?! Sounds quite shady really…

What aggravates me the most is that there is no changes to warrant a 33% increase. Yahoo already takes 1%, or more, of the total sales each month for doing nothing. Now they add an extra 30 bucks a month…thats like a instant 12 million dollar profit (PER MONTH!) for doing nothing more than they are doing right now.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE Yahoo Stores. Its easy to use, its really search engine friendly and it includes 95% of the features needed to operate an successful online business. I just hate the fact that companies do this type of thing knowing how handicapped most business owners are. I know that I am not packing up and leaving to start over somewhere else and other Yahoo store owners won't do it either.

Please don't take this message the wrong way. Sometimes we get used to being able to operate our business as cheaply and efficiently as possible and when someone throws a monkey wrench in the program, we get our panties in a bunch. All in all, a Yahoo store is still one of the cheapest ways to operate an ecommerce business online and as long as Yahoo continues to prove their system produces, we will keep on paying the price.

But it doesn't mean we cannot gripe about it from time to time;-p

Recently I had to work on a couple of stores with seemingly weird problems. In one store, on some pages layout was all over the place, and in the other, nothing showed up on the page except the store header. In both of these cases the culprit turned out to be buggy HTML. Since this wasn't the first time I encountered problems like this, I decided to write these notes so that you can avoid these mistakes.

When I looked at the first problem store, the page looked ok up to the bottom of the caption, but after that the navigation parts and footer were all messed up, misaligned and broken. Since most other pages were Ok, I suspected that the problem was not on the template level, but somewhere in the HTML entered by the store operator. So I edited the page and looked in the "Caption" field. Sure enough, they copied and pasted some table-based HTML layout, which, as it turned out, they created in DreamWeaver. I new something was amiss when I saw that their caption started with <td>. A <td> tag can never appear by itself, without an opening <table> and <tr> tag. Throwing extra or not enough of these tags around will without a doubt break any layout, especially table-based ones. To me the easiest way to fix something like that is to copy that HTML and paste it into Microsoft FrontPage. Now, say what you want, I do like FrontPage for a number of reasons, one of which is that if you paste any HTML into its "HTML View", then switch to "Design View" and then back to "HTML View", FrontPage will not only arrange and indent the HTML so that it's easy to follow, it will also fix up the HTML by adding missing opening or closing tags. While it doesn't always get it 100% right, a piece of HTML fixed up that way is a lot easier to correct than trying to hunt down the errors yourself. By the way, I use FrontPage 2000; newer versions don't seem to have this code-fixing / reformatting "feature", not sure why.

The second store, as I said, showed nothing after the beginning of the left navigation bar, but only in Internet Explorer. It was fine in Firefox. This happens if the code includes a <style>, <script>, or <!– tag without their closing counterparts. While Firefox is smart enough to implicitly close these when it encounters other valid HTML tags, Internet Explorer will simply treat the rest of the page as part of the style, script or comment block, essentially hiding the rest of the page completely. In most cases, I work in Firefox and only switch over to other browsers to test, so I got into the habit of always writing the opening and closing tags of these "problem" tags before I write anything else. For example, if I want to include a <style> block, I always write:

<style>

<!–

//–>

</style>

first, then go back and fill out the inside of that block. That way I won't accidentally forget the closing tag.

If you are an existing Yahoo store owner, you are already aware of the standard availability options for your products. From "Usually ships the same business day" to "Contact us for availability" the Yahoo Store standard variables allow store owners to set the availability for their customers to view. You can set this variable store wide by going to VARIABLES and then to the STORE PROPERTIES section. You should now see the Availability menu. (see below)

By setting the availability here, it will effect ALL your products in your Yahoo Store. If you have a few items that need to be set to something else, then you must navigate to those pages and manually override the availability value and set it on those pages.

Now here is where it gets cool. What if you would like to have something other than the standard options that Yahoo provides? Maybe you want your option to read "In Stock and Ready to Ship" or "Currently on Backorder". Database Upload to the rescue!

You can set custom values for Availability on a per product basis in the following way.

1. Make a note of the product IDs for which you wish to set a custom availability. Merchants can download their product database from Catalog Manager to set this for many products.
2. Create a spreadsheet with two columns: ID and Availability (or delete all columns except for ID and add Availability if using your product database from Catalog Manager).
3. Enter text in the availability column which you wish to appear on the product such as “Item is on backorder” or “Estimated release date January 2008″.
4. Save the file as .CSV format with the name data.csv.
5. Upload to the Store Editor using the database upload feature and click the Add button when uploaded. Note: Do not add this file as a Rebuild. This will wipe out your store contents except for the items and information in the spreadsheet. You can use the Revert feature if you make a mistake and Rebuild your store.
6. Publish your changes when ready.

Cool huh? Learn these and many more as a Backstage member.