Can somebody give me the lowdown on the yahoo store thing?

[budbiss]

I am looking at building a new online store and although in the past I have always felt that the Yahoo store was just a cheap, amateur way of achieving an online presense. But recently I have come across some very nicely done sites only to find out that they are yahoo store sites.

Anyways, here are my questions:
1) How do yahoo sites rank with search engines?
2) What are the advantages to having a yahoo store vs a 'hand built' one?
3) What are the disadvantages?
4) How many people here use yahoo stores?

BTW, I am looking at the plan that is 39.95...from what I see this should work out for our business...is there anything I should consider as well?

[mattb]

Good questions.

We currently run a Yahoo Store and another site that is not a Yahoo Store. We opened the Yahoo Store 2 years ago to get traffic from Yahoo Shopping. Now that Yahoo Shopping is open to all merchants via a data feed, we are evaluating the effectiveness of having a separate Yahoo Store. The one advantage I can see is the Yahoo Store ranks higher in Yahoo Shopping searches. Perhaps others can comment on this.

Yahoo Stores generally rank ok in other search engines due to the URL structure. One problem with Y Stores is the difficulty in learning how to maintain the product database. They also keep changing the pricing structure.

[shiva777]

Yahoo is WAY overpriced. It used to be that they included their merchants automatically in their pay-per-click advertising but no more. Unless you are an extreme techno-phobe with money to burn you should really get an easy to use shopping cart. It might take a few days to get a handle on it, but will pay off in the long run.

-shiva777

[budbiss]

Thanks, from all I have been reading in the past few days, that seems to be the route I am going to take. BTW, are their any carts you would recommend?

[fivaxis]

I use Secure Net Shop, I really like it.

[bsnrjones]

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