Yahoo Merchant Reviewer's Comments
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Yahoo! Merchant Starter from Yahoo! Inc. is a fine package for anyone ready to start a custom ecommerce site fast. Yahoo! provides tools to build your site, host your site, and has a secure shopping cart ready for you to gather customer information. They also have partners arranged to get you a merchant account quickly. And Yahoo! has a one of the finest website builders available; with this software you can completely customize how your website looks using drag-and-drop tools. Learn how to start your eCommerce site here.
A liability we found with Yahoo!'s service is the 1.5% charge they add to every purchase transaction on your site. This might not seem like much, but when you consider that your merchant account will also charge you a per-transaction fee, the extra will add up every month. Yahoo! is running a special sign-up offer, your first twom months is $29.96 then it will go to the regular monthly price.
Feature Set:
Yahoo! Merchant Starter offers you some excellent features. First, their hosting package lets you have 10 GB of disk space as well as 200 GB of data transfer a month. This generous transfer and storage space will keep you from worrying about maxing out your limits; it isn't likely.
Yahoo! does offer some great sales and inventory reports. You can view order totals, number of items sold, revenue generated, average order size, and inventory levels. These reports are clearly readable graphs. Advanced tracking statistics (such as learning where your visitors go on your website) are available with more expensive Yahoo! hosting packages.
Ease of Use:
Yahoo! Merchant starter gives you easy-to-use design tools with step-by-step instructions and sample layouts to get you started. The controls are intuitive; by simply looking at the screen you'll find your way around without a hassle. They also offer 30 days free consulting. The main control screen gives you instant access to web hosting, website design, email accounts, storage preferences, and catalog management.
With catalog management, you can view each of your products, pricing, and other detailed information. You can also create departments within the catalog to sort and manage your products, and you can view your inventory.
Ease of Setup:
Yahoo!'s website wizards walk you through setting up your online store. Yahoo! offers you a variety of ways to build your site. If you want to start fast with a basic template and preset website components, Yahoo!'s store editor can help you do this fast.
One of the most appealing elements Yahoo! offers their SiteBuilder tool. Within SiteBuilder you can control exactly how you want your store to look by clicking on an object and dragging it to where you want to go. Because there are so many options, the tool may take some time to learn to manage, but with this application you can take your site's design to a whole new level.
Help/Documentation:
With Yahoo!, you can call a toll-free number to speak to a customer support representative any time of the day or night, 24-hours a day, seven days a week. They also offer email support. Yahoo! provides comprehensive online help resources, tutorials, and getting started guides too.
Fraud Protection:
Click here to learn how credit card fraud affects you.
Yahoo! provides you with a secure https server (SSL) for customer transactions. They also require customers to enter in the CVV2 value from the back of the credit card—this helps ensure that the customer has the actually card; thieves often have just the credit card number and so can't give the CVV2 code. The credit card company you select will provide you with more fraud protection tools. (For credit card processing you can use Paymentech or another company that is compatible with FDMS Nashville Platform.
Summary:
Yahoo! does offer some direct discounts on email advertising, search engine submissions and on pay-per-click marketing, but these are mainly one-time, startup discounts and don't even come close to offsetting that extra 1.5% cost. These discounts will point you in the right direction for marketing your website, though. For example, you'll learn about bidding on adwords when you use their Google adwords gift certificate—but at a price we feel is high.
Yahoo! Merchant is a great package to get you started online. FrontPage may take beginners some time to learn, but is worth the effort since you can give your website a unique look rather than settle for a generic template design.
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