Reason 1,357,998 to love the Yahoo! Store: Easy Access to Yahoo! Shopping

Today Nielsen Online reported a 50% increase in year-over-year traffic at Shopping.Yahoo.com.

This is the biggest increase, by far, of any major retail site or portal. Read more at Internet Retailer, http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=26110

 Yahoo! Store New Feature - American Express Verification

Yahoo! Small Business users may now 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 Yahoo! has updated Checkout Manager to allow for displaying this field and passing the value through FDMS to American Express.

Special Note: Ventura Web Design recommends that all merchants who have their risk tools set to require CVV publish their order settings immediately. Without a publish, customers wishing to pay via American Express may be unable to checkout and/or may receive an error message stating that “CVV is required” but will be unable to enter that code on the checkout form.

Yahoo! has announced several new features that will be released soon.  Below is a breakdown of what’s new:

•           AMEX CID Code Support

•           Custom Labels for New Cross-Sell Tool

•           Reporting for New Cross-Sell Tool

•           Payment API Integration *Beta* with StoneEdge

•           Default Product Image Format Selection (GIF, JPEG & PNG)

RELEASE NOTES:

American Express CID Codes

The payment gateway that Yahoo! Store uses, First Data Merchant Services (FDMS) Nashville Platform, now supports CID (Card Identification) codes used by American Express. Merchants who would like to use the CID code when accepting American Express as a Payment Method will need to take specific steps to enable support for this feature with American Express. It is very important to review our Help content in detail prior to enabling this feature (help content will not be live until the release is completed).

Customize Labels in New Cross-Sell Tool

We’re adding more flexibility to Cross-sell display by allowing merchants to control the price labels. With this change, merchants will be able to customize labels for regular, sale, and cross-sell discount prices in both the product page and cart cross-sell to suit the needs of their site. For more detailed information on this feature, including steps to activate, please see our Help pages (help content will not be live until the release is completed).

Reporting for New Cross-Sell Tool

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. 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.

Payment API Integration *Beta* with StoneEdge

StoneEdge users can now integrate payment and order processing of their Yahoo! Store orders directly with StoneEdge. This will allow you to process payments, modify orders, and change order statuses directly in the StoneEdge application.  Please contact your Account Manager for more information and to enable API settings in your store.

Default Product Image Format Selection

Currently, if you upload images larger than the values specified 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 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. 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 detailed information on this feature, please see our Help pages (help content will not be live until the release is completed).

Our booth setup call time was 6am. Needless to say, some of our presenters were a little late since it’s a Saturday. After some Starbucks, we’re ready to go.

8:15am.
Ventura CEO, Kevin Richards, demonstrates the Yahoo! Store to Las Vegas Mayor, Oscar Goodman.

9:35am.
We just met a mother of two beautiful twin girls. She needs a way to generate income from home. What better way to do that than with the Yahoo! Store.

11:45am.
Wow! We’ve met with so many people this morning. We brought over 800 information packets and we’re almost out. This has been a great day teaching small business owners and young entrepreneurs about the benefits of a Ventura Upgraded Yahoo! Store.

March 1st @ 8am.

You’re invited to join Ventura Web Design when we demonstrate the Yahoo! Store platform to over 1,000 attendees at the NCET Entrepreneur Expo.  Small business owners from around the world will be learning about the benefits and exceptional resources made available through Ventura Web Design and the Yahoo! Store.

We will be blogging from the event, so even if you’re not in Las Vegas, we will still share our knowledge with you.

Yahoo! announced today some major upgrades and modifications designed to improve the overall reliability and performance of the platform. Here’s a summary:

1) Yahoo! Stores will be backed up and hosted in different geographic locations.  Simply put, your store will be shown to the end user via the server closest to him/her.  This will make your site much faster, while making the backups more reliable in the event of a natural disaster.

2) The capacity to accept orders has been more than doubled.
3) The speed at which websites are displayed (referred to as serving capacity) has been doubled.

Ventura is proud to announce these improvements to our clients.  This is one major step in the right direction from Yahoo!.

Check it out! www.ScentsandSprays.com is our first store to implement and utilize the new Carousel Feature. Inspired by those geniuses over at Amazon.com, this feature enables Yahoo! Store owners to easily promote products on their front page in a fun and usable way.

This new feature can be in addition to, or in lieu of, your standard front page Specials.

So take a minute to checkout this great new feature. Send us a comment and let us know what you think.

For months Wall Street has been speculating about a possible buyout of Yahoo! by technology giant, Microsoft.  Today, Microsoft announced plans to offer a significant amount of cash and stock for the purchase of Yahoo!. 

So how does this possible buyout affect the Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Merchant Solutions platform?  A Yahoo! Insider tells Ventura Web Design that “it is much too early to speculate” how this deal may improve or diminish the leading provider of ECommerce software to more than 40,000 small and medium sized businesses. 

Imran Khan of JP Morgan says that “The companies have a number of duplicative efforts in search monetization, sales and technology, so this will drive cost savings.” 

When looking specifically at how today’s news may relate to just the Ecommerce platform, it is important to remember that Microsoft has been attempting to be in the same market as Yahoo! Stores for a while.  Many will remember the bCentral platform.  Microsoft’s most recent attempt includes the Microsoft Office Live platform.  (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officelive/). 

Stay tuned to the Ventura Web Design Blog (www.venturawebdesign.com/blog) for more information on how this news will affect you and your business. 

Ventura Web Design is proud to offer 20% off any Hacker Safe product or service to our clients. 

ScanAlert, best known for its HACKER SAFE trustmark, is the world’s leading provider of website security services. HACKER SAFE technology protects over 250,000 websites, of which over 80,000 display the well known trustmark. In addition to being used by the majority of the Internet Retailer Top 500 list, it is the only trustmark displayed within the search results of major comparison shopping sites. As a leading provider of PCI compliance services, ScanAlert also delivers multilingual PCI validation to merchants and payment processors in over 70 countries. Tens of thousands of organizations - from small online businesses to FORTUNE 500 multinationals - rely on ScanAlert to protect, audit and certify the security of their networks and ecommerce infrastructure.

Tens of thousands of organizations from small non-profits to FORTUNE 500 multinationals rely on ScanAlert to protect, audit and certify the security of their networks and ecommerce infrastructure. Customers include: A&E Television Networks, Ace Hardware, American Red Cross, Fidelity National, General Nutrition Centers, HP, Johnson & Johnson, Northrop Grumman, PETCO, Prudential, Ritz Camera, Sony, The Sports Authority, The World Bank, U-Haul, Visa International, Warner Brothers and Yahoo!

Contact your Account Manager today for details on this exciting partnership.

Checkout this tool, Yslow.  http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

This is an add-on to the FireFox web browser that will allow you to see vital speed statistics regarding your website performance.

Looking for a way to make your site more accessible to customers?  Start by making sure that it’s as clean and fast as possible.  The Yslow tool will help.