Custom Availability in your Yahoo Stores

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.