Registering for a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Account

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.

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Choosing a Merchant Solutions Package

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.

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Getting Started with Yahoo Merchant Solutions

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.

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Understanding Conversion Ratio, Click Value, and ROI

Understanding Conversion Ratio, Click Value, and ROI

There’s one huge disadvantage to PPC ads, though . . . they cost money. Sometimes a lot of
money. Often, in fact, so much money that you will lose money if you buy PPC ads! In order to
use PPC, you really must understand Conversion Ratio, Breakeven Click Value, and Return on
Investment (ROI):

■ Conversion Ratio The proportion of visitors to your site who buy from you. This is the
foundation of any click-value or ROI calculation.

■ Breakeven Click Value The “breakeven” value of a click is the maximum sum you
can pay for a click and not lose money. Of course, you want to pay as little as possible,
but there’s a point at which a click doesn’t make you money and doesn’t lose you money.
If you go over the price, however, you start losing.

■ Return on Investment The amount of money you make after investing in advertising,
typically expressed in terms of the sum returned for every dollar invested. If you pay
$1,000 for ads, and make a profit of $10,000, your ROI is $10 per $1 invested.
You need to consider these things three times:

■ When you have no background information When you first begin considering PPC
ads, you may not know what your conversion ratio is. That is, you don’t know how
many people coming to your site will buy from you. You can, however, do a simple
“guesstimate” to figure out whether PPC will work for you. At this point, you can decide
if PPC is worth doing.

■ When you know your conversion ratio Once you understand what your conversion
ratio really is, you can calculate more accurately whether PPC will work for you. At this
point, you’ll have a much better idea of the likelihood of success.

■ When you’re running a PPC campaign Once you’re buying PPC ads, and people
are coming to your site, you can calculate ROI exactly. It’s then that you’ll know exactly
whether (under current conditions) PPC works for you.
In order to calculate click value and ROI, you must first know—or estimate—your conversion
ratio. The conversion ratio is the relationship between the number of people carrying out some
process and the number of those people who move on to the “next step.” For instance:

■ If 100 people see an ad, and three click the ad, the “conversion” is 3:100, or three percent.

■ If 100 people come to your web site, and ten sign up for a newsletter, the “conversion” is
10:100, or 10 percent.

■ If 100 people come to your web site, and one buys a product, the “conversion” is 1:100,
or 1 percent.

Of course, it’s the last of these that we’re most interested in. Of all the people who come to
your site, how many will buy? This conversion ratio is the core of any ROI calculation.

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Understanding the PPC Process

Understanding the PPC Process

The basic process of using Pay Per Click is pretty simple:

1. Decide to which pages you want to direct traffic from your ads. You can bring traffic to
any page you wish, not just the home page.

2. Register with a PPC system—you’ll provide a credit card to be used to pay for the ads—
and “load” the account with some money to begin with.

3. Write one or more PPC ads (carefully follow the system’s ad guidelines, or the ad won’t
be placed).

4. Associate keywords with your ad—that is, decide which keywords will “trigger” your
ads to appear.

5. Place a bid on each keyword for each ad—in other words, tell the PPC system how much
you are willing to pay every time someone clicks your ad.

6. Turn on the ad campaign and wait for the traffic to appear.

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The PPC Systems

The PPC Systems

There are many PPC systems, but only three big ones, and a few “second-tier” systems:
■ Google AdWords Perhaps the best-known PPC system is Google AdWords (http://
adwords.google.com/). Since Google is the single most important search engine, this
system displays many millions of PPC ads every day.
■ Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions (formerly Overture) This system is also huge,
and displays many millions of ads each day (www.overture.com/). Overture was the
original PPC search-engine company.
■ MSN adCenter MSN, Microsoft’s online service, actually gets its PPC ads from
Yahoo! at present. However, it’s in the process of building its own PPC system and by
the summer of 2006 will probably have stopped using Yahoo! ads entirely.
The “second-tier” systems include services such as FindWhat (www.findwhat.com/),
LookSmart (www.looksmark.com/), Enhance (www.enhance.com/), ePilot (www.epilot.com/),
Espotting (www.espotting.com/), and Kanoodle (www.kanoodle.com/).
Others also exist. In fact, there are literally hundreds of PPC systems . . . most of which are
not worth dealing with. For example, when you figure the time it takes to configure the systems,
it’s not worth the small amount of admittedly cheap clicks you’ll get—and some that border on
the fraudulent (you’ll get little or no traffic from them, but will pay a setup fee that you’ll never
see again). In general, you’ll want to avoid very small PPC systems, and stick to the first- and
second-tier systems.

[ ... ]

What Is PPC?

What Is PPC?

Pay Per Click (PPC) is big business. In fact, it’s the primary manner in which Google makes
money—almost all its income, 98 percent, comes from PPC—and is very important to Yahoo!
as well. Pay Per Click has brought mass-media advertising to small businesses. Businesses that
would never have spent money on radio, TV, or newspapers, are now spending it on PPC . . . and
sometimes even making a profit!
Sometimes? Well, the fact is that PPC doesn’t work for everyone, as you’ll learn in this
chapter. You need the right combination of gross profit per sale, Pay Per Click price, and website
conversion ratio. If you don’t have the right combination—and many businesses simply
don’t—PPC will lose you money. Get everything lined up just right, though, and PPC can
provide a regular, predictable flow of profitable business to your web site.

Pay Per Click refers to an advertising mechanism in which advertisers pay each time someone
clicks their ad. More specifically, though, these days it refers to ads displayed on search-engine
results pages.
You can see an example in Figure 22-1. At the top of the search results are two small
ads—shown on a light blue background in this instance. In the top-right corner, notice the words
Sponsored Links. More ads appear down the side of the page—again with the words Sponsored
Links, but this time above the ads.
Each time someone clicks one of these links, the company that placed the ad is charged. How
much? Somewhere from 5 cents (on Google) or 10 cents (on Yahoo!) to many dollars! Some
PPC ads cost as much as $50 per click, occasionally even more!

Because large PPC systems generally “feed” a variety of sites, when you buy ads through
a system such as Google or Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions, your ads may end up on many
different search sites. But you may also have your ads distributed elsewhere, like on the pages of
thousands of different web sites, thanks to the Google AdSense distribution program.
PPC advertising has a number of advantages:

■ It’s very quick. You can start getting results from the search engines in a day or two (in
theory, a few hours, but in most cases it takes a little longer to get everything sorted out).
■ It’s reliable. Using PPC to get traffic to your site is very reliable. You can generate a lot
of traffic, and always appear for appropriate searches in the major search engines . . . if
you’re willing to pay enough.
■ It’s easy to measure. You can see just how much traffic you’re getting, and even figure
out how much of the traffic turns into business.

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