Setting Up a Credit Card Merchant Account

Setting Up a Credit Card Merchant Account

In order to sell, you need a way to take money. While there are a number of different ways
to take payments in order to have a functional
Merchant Solutions store, you must set up the store to accept credit-card payments. (Yahoo!
won’t allow you to open until you do so.) As this may take a few days to sort out, it would be
nice if you could start the process right away.
One thing you may need to prepare—you’ll need a land-line phone number. If you, like so
many people these days, only have a cell number, you’ll have to set up a land line before you
can apply for a merchant account if you want to use Paymentech, Yahoo!’s recommended
merchant-account provider (it’s one of Paymentech’s policies that you must have a land line).
On the other hand, the second recommended company, 1st American Card Service, does not
require this.
Unfortunately, you cannot complete the merchant account setup until some key items are
present—your store must be “ready for business with clear product and pricing information
available for viewing” so that the company issuing the merchant account can review it. Even
if you don’t have everything complete when you apply, you must at least have a site that looks
complete—one or more products, a contact page, privacy page, and so on. So go ahead and build
your store, and when you’re ready. Or perhaps get the
paperwork in now, but be aware that the process will grind to a halt fairly quickly.
You are backing up data, aren’t you? You need to protect your business information.
What if you lost all your product-catalog data, or lost the program that stores all your
passwords or all your accounting information? Would it hurt? Would it take much time
to recover? If you’re serious about doing business online, you need to find some way
to back up data. And that means off-site! One good strategy is to buy two external USB
hard drives and do a full backup onto both. Store one in your office and back up every
day, and store the other somewhere else, such as a safe-deposit box. Switch them every
week or two.
We’ll see how to enter your products into the store catalog.

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Creating a Store Security Key

Creating a Store Security Key

When you created your Merchant Solutions account, you had to either provide information about
an existing Yahoo! account or create a new account. The Yahoo! account has an ID (to identify
you), and a password (to ensure that only you can access the account). There’s one more form
of account protection that you’re going to need, a security key. The security key is required for
access to many, although not all, areas of your Merchant Solutions account. This allows you to
set up a store account that can be used by, for example, a web designer, but that will give you
sole access to important areas.

Do you have several people who are going to be working on your store? Maybe a couple
of web designers, someone who updates your product list, a staff member responsible for
inventory, and so on? You can create different accounts for each person, providing different
permissions to each. Each staff member must set up a Yahoo! account and check the Add this
profile to the Yahoo! Member Directory box in their Edit Public Profile page. You can then
set up an account in the store using the Access link in the Site Settings column.

The security key is required to view orders—for instance, to set up payment methods or to
change basic account information. It is not required for access to the Store Editor—where you
can create store pages—or to some other less sensitive areas.
It’s a good idea to set up your security key right away, before you allow other people access
to the Store Manager.
1. Click the Pay Methods link in the Store Manager.
2. Yahoo! will ask you for your account password, to verify that you have the right to create
a security key. Type the password and click Continue.
3. Provide a security key, another password. It must contain at least six characters and
cannot match or contain your Yahoo! ID or password, nor include your first or last name.
4. Provide all the other information requested. Yahoo! asks you to confirm some basic
information, including the credit card used to set up the account.
5. Click Submit This Form.

Spend much time online at all, and you’ll end up with a whole lot of account IDs and
passwords. Ideally, these should not be easy to figure out and should vary, so eventually you
have a problem—how do you remember them all? Write them down, and the paper may be
found; don’t write them down, and you’ll eventually forget some of them. A more effective
way to store them is to use a password-management program. One great program is Password
Depot (http://www.password-depot.com/). You can find others at any good download site,
such as WUGNET.com and Tucows.com.

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Pointing www to the Store

Pointing www to the Store

By default, Yahoo! sets up your domain so that it points in two different “directions”:

■ Type www.yourdomain.com into a browser, and the browser goes to your web-hosting
account at Yahoo!.
■ Type store.yourdomain.com into a browser, and the browser goes to your store pages.
What if you’re not planning to use the web-hosting account? If you have decided to use
Merchant Solutions alone and want to point www.yourdomain.com to the store itself, you can
change this setting:

1. In Store Manager, click the Domain link (near the top-right corner) to open the Domain
Control Panel.
2. Click the Manage Domain & Subdomains link.
3. You’ll see the domain listed in a table; click the Edit link.
4. In the following page, select the Change the destination to my Store Editor home
page option button.
5. Click the Submit button at the bottom of the page.
The change won’t be immediate; the switchover may take a few minutes or could take eight
hours or more to complete. Eventually, however, when anyone types www.yourdomain.com into
a browser, they’ll end up at your store’s home page.

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Pointing Your Domain to Your Store

Pointing Your Domain to Your Store

If you already own a domain name—and therefore did not register one for the store during your
Merchant Solutions account setup—you need to point the domain to the store. In other words,
you have to change the domain’s settings so that when someone types the domain into a browser,
the main page from your store will be loaded.
In order to point a domain to a web site, you have to change the DNS settings for the domain.
DNS means Domain Name System; it’s the system used by the Internet to specify where a web
site can be found. When you change DNS settings, you are telling the Internet which web server
has your site so that a browser knows where to go to find it. In order to point your domain to
your Merchant Solutions store, you have to change the nameserver information associated with
your domain to use the Yahoo! nameserver information.
This sounds a little complicated, but don’t worry too much about the technical aspects.
Yahoo! should send you an e-mail providing the nameserver information if you told Yahoo! that
you intended to use an existing domain. (If you can’t find this information, call and talk to their
customer support people.)
Provide this information to whoever manages your domain name. If that’s you, go to the
registrar’s web site and look for a page where you’ll see “Set Nameservers” or something
similar, and follow instructions there.

You can only point a single domain to a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions store. However, you
can forward as many domains to the store as you wish. With forwarding, you don’t change
nameserver information; you simply tell the registrar to forward browsers to another
domain name.

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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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