Registering for a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Account

To register for an account, navigate to http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant, click the Merchant
Solutions link, and follow the instructions. The forms will lead you through the process of picking
a domain name and will try to “upsell” you on a more expensive Merchant Solutions account.
Remember that all packages come with 24-hour, toll-free support, 30 days of consulting, and the
ability to be upgraded later (with no setup cost).

After you have registered your account, you should receive several e-mails from Yahoo! Read
these carefully—and save them—as they include important information.If you can’t find your way back to your Manage My Services area, go to the Small Business
Home (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/), then click the Manage My Services button in the
top right.

The Manage My Services page, shown in Figure 12-2, is the central “control panel” for all
your Yahoo! services. The list that follows shows what you can do from this page.
■ You’ll see a Store Manager link; this is where you’ll work with your Merchant Solutions
e-commerce system.
■ There’s a Web Hosting Control Panel link. This takes you to where you’ll manage your
web-hosting account.
■ The Domain Control Panel link takes you to an area where you manage your domain
name, if you registered it through Yahoo!.
■ Every Merchant Solutions account comes with 100 e-mail accounts; the Email Control
Panel link takes you to where you can manage these.
■ Use the Check Email link to read e-mail messages using the Yahoo! Small Business
Email system.
■ Click Compose Email to create an e-mail message.
■ Click View www.domain.com to open a browser window containing your store.
(Remember, when you first set up the account, you’ll see an Under Construction
message.)
■ Use the Billing Information links to view or modify the information used to pay for your
Merchant Solutions account each month.
■ Click the Change Plan link if you want to upgrade to the next Merchant Solutions
package.
■ Click Add Extras to add e-mail accounts or disk space.

When you first view the Manage My Services page, you’ll find that the Status is set to
pending. You can begin working on your account, but it takes a little while for the domain
name to point to the store. In other words, if you open a browser, type the domain name into the
browser (store.puresauna.com, for instance), and press ENTER, the browser will not load a web
page from your store; you may see an error page or a Yahoo! Under Construction page. It will
take a few hours, perhaps a day or so, before the domain name points to the site.