Getting Started with Yahoo Merchant Solutions

So you’re selling on eBay. Is that enough? Maybe. But many businesses selling online use
multiple channels, which really is what this book is all about. If you’re only selling through
eBay you may be leaving money on the table. Using multiple sales channels can both increase
revenues—that is, grow your business larger, faster—and make your business more stable.
Fluctuations in one channel are easier to handle when you have several channels bringing you
business. So, in the second part of the book, we’re going to look at how to set up an online
store . . . using Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.
Yahoo! Merchant Solutions provides a quick and easy way to start selling online through
your own store. You can present your products to the public, take orders using credit cards, view
sales statistics, and do everything else required when building a successful online business. You
can see an example of a store created using Merchant Solutions in Figure 12-1.
You have plenty of choices when picking an e-commerce system . . . so why use Yahoo!
Merchant Solutions? Yahoo! Merchant Solutions has many advantages and is a good choice for
many small merchants:

■ It’s Yahoo!. You’ve got a big brand behind you, which means . . .
■ Stability They’ll still be around next year, and the year after that, while plenty of
e-commerce service providers have gone out of business!
■ Great support Toll-free, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there’s always
someone you can talk to, and in most cases, they’ll answer quickly. They also
provide a dedicated “consultant” you can talk to for the first 30 days—you’ll get
a real person’s name and direct phone number.
■ Solid infrastructure Yahoo!’s web servers are fast and stable. Interruptions in
service are likely to be rare and brief. And Yahoo.com is the world’s most popular
web site, so the company knows how to handle huge amounts of web traffic and
enormous traffic surges (so you know your site won’t go down at Christmas!).
■ It’s proven. Some people who started small e-commerce stores with Yahoo! are now
doing millions of dollars’ worth of business each year . . . and are still with Yahoo!.
■ You’re in good company. Merchant Solutions is probably the most popular e-commerce
system on the Web; more merchants use this software than any other product.
■ It can handle volume. Merchant Solutions can handle catalogs of up to 50,000 products,
as well as rapid transaction frequencies. Some companies sell millions of dollars’ worth
of their products through this system each year, and have been doing so for five years or
more.
■ You’re on a development path. You can start with the basic Store Editor creation tool
now (as explained in Chapter 14), and shift to more advanced HTML-development tools
later, as the business grows.
■ You’re with a consulting community. Yahoo! has been selling an e-commerce system
for a number of years now (in fact, the system they use has probably been on the
market for around ten years). There’s a large community of Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
developers, so it’s easy to hire someone to help with your store.
■ It’s affordable. You can begin selling online for as little as $40 a month with a $50
setup fee.
■ It’s flexible. In this book, we’ll be looking at the basic page-creation tool, Store Editor.
However, Merchant Solutions allows you to create web pages with any HTML tool, and
to use Perl and PHP scripts and MySQL databases.
■ It’s simple. Actually, Yahoo!’s most basic page-creation tool can be difficult to learn
if you have to do so on your own. You don’t. This book leads you through the Yahoo!
Merchant Solutions setup, making it into an easy-to-use system.
■ It offers a simple credit-card processing setup. Some systems make setting up creditcard
transactions complicated. Merchant Solutions makes it easy.
■ Web hosting is included. When you sign up for a Merchant Solutions account, you get
a full-featured web-hosting account, too.
■ You get Yahoo! Shopping integration. Yahoo! makes it very easy to submit products to
Yahoo! Shopping; in fact, Yahoo! Shopping will check your product information up to
four times a day to ensure it has the most recent data (see Chapter 21).
■ There are lots of discounts. Yahoo! Merchant Solutions members get special discounts
on various services. For instance, you’ll save 20 percent on click fees through Yahoo!
Shopping (see Chapter 21), You’ll also get a three-month free trial on an e-mail
marketing tool, as well as a 33-percent discount on a “keyword analysis” tool.

So let’s get moving right away and begin building your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions store.