Choosing a Merchant Solutions Package

Yahoo! has three different packages available: Starter, Standard, and Professional. All three
packages allow you to take credit-card orders, provide you with an equal number of e-mail
accounts, provide automated UPS-shipping processing, come with 24-hour, toll-free support
and 30 days “consulting” assistance, and so on. You can find details about these features online
(http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant), but the following list provides a quick summary of
the sort of features you’ll find in all three packages:

■ Free domain name with your store
■ Free support by 24/7 phone line and e-mail
■ Web-hosting space where you can store image files and create web pages, along with
10GB of disk space to store your files and 200GB of data transfer per month
■ One hundred e-mail accounts, with 2GB storage space per account
■ A shopping-cart system that allows buyers to purchase products using credit cards
■ An order-management system in which you can process orders
■ A way to receive orders by fax and e-mail
■ Integration with UPS’s shipping system for price calculations, shipment tracking, and
label printing
■ Statistics related to traffic in your store and sales made

Make sure you look at Yahoo!’s policies (http://store.yahoo.com/vw/guide.html). Yahoo!
won’t let just anyone use one of their Merchant Solutions stores. Some products are banned
from the Yahoo! system.

All packages have these features . . . so what are the differences? There are only a few ways
in which they vary, which makes it relatively easy to choose among the packages. Table 12-1
summarizes the differences among the three packages.
With the Starter package, you won’t be able to export orders to the UPS WorldShip service
(useful if you ship a lot of packages through UPS, not so important when first starting out). You
also won’t be able to automatically export transaction data to other software programs. You
won’t be able to accept orders faxed to you. The statistics provided to you won’t be as good; you
won’t be able to see the click trails—the path taken by visitors through your site—and won’t
be able to see search terms people used to find your site or to search within your site. You also
won’t be able to use gift certificates, the cross-sell feature (which allows you to suggest related
items when someone selects a product), or coupons, and you won’t be able to create trackable
links—a tool that helps you build simple “affiliate relationships” through which you can pay
other web sites a commission for sending buyers to your store. There’s another important
difference, too. When you sell a product, Yahoo! takes a transaction fee: sell a $100 product and
Yahoo! will take $1.50 if you have the Starter, $1.00 for the Standard, and just 75 cents if you
have the Professional package.

So which do you choose? You only need the Professional package if you do a lot of
shipments through UPS, or if the savings in the transaction fees outweigh the additional monthly
fee. So, most people just starting out can forget this option. The Standard package has useful
features—fax orders, better statistics, gift certificates, coupons, cross-sell, and trackable links—
all of which are missing in the Starter. But for many, a good choice is the Starter because you’ll
pay much less while you build the store and learn how to use it. When you’re ready, you can
contact Yahoo! and upgrade to the Standard package, and once you do a lot of business, you can
upgrade to the Professional package with no additional setup fee. (In this book we’re going to be
using the Standard package.)
If you’d like to see a chart listing all the features and comparing the three packages, click
one of the Features buttons you’ll see when you first enter the Merchant Solutions home page
(http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/), then click the Compare button on the page that
appears.

If you run into problems during the sign-up, call and chat with Yahoo! at 1-866-781-9246.
Also, note that Yahoo! will provide 30 days free consulting with any of the packages; you can
ask them to look at your site and suggest improvements.