What are the pros and cons of Yahoo! stores?

[budbiss]

We have an existing ecommerce site, but it is time for us to create a new site and I am looking at our options. Our existing uses OSCommerce, which just isn't working out for us. I am considering going with a Yahoo! store, but I was wondering if anyone could tell me what the advantages and disadvantages are.

Also, I would not be doing any of the design or developement myself, I would be hiring someone to do that.

[minnapple]

I have worked with yahoo stores for the last 5 years.

Pros:
- Good site structure for seo with a few basic template modifications.
- Many options available.

Cons:
-Revenue share
-Poor customer service.
-Limited amount of programmers that now how to work with the templates.

If you have a site that generates a lot sales, you get an account rep that reduces the customer service issues.

Finding a good programmer with contacts within Yahoo is a plus.

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer!
I couldn't program myself out of a paper bag.

[Corey Bryant]

Check your competitors' prices on there. Can you beat them? A few merchants that use them have been pleased with their services. I have had to call Yahoo a few times in the past for some of the merchants, and the customer service was great.

Basically Yahoo offers you a gateway to process the transactions and they will charge a percentage of the transaction. You will still pay a percentage as well to the merchant account account provider (and you don't have to use the one they have on their site). Their discount rate is a little more expensive but the company they use is one of the largest ISOs in the business. They partner with one of the largest transaction processors as well.

So consider the 2.69% on the merchant side and between .5-1.5% on the Yahoo gateway side if you use their processor. You can be charged about 4.19% for a transaction. Which some people might deem high. You can try knocking off 50 base points as well on some other processors.

Make sure that you can make a decent living with the prices that you charge

Also, if you understand HTML, it might be more difficult to set it up actually because you are limited on the HTML code

-Corey

[ispy]

Templates Con: Your site looks like all the other Yahoo stores, perhaps with some different colors or fonts thrown in. How do you stand out or build an image with this?

[minnapple]

Yahoo stores can have custom designs.
Programming is done in rtml.
When you get larger in terms of sales, percentages can be negotiated.

[sun818]

Is it true you are not included in their shopping search results for free any more?

[Buscamos]

They do not include you for free in their SERPs. They do however include you in their directory. The problem that we've had w/ using Yahoo Store is that we had a custom template designed for us. However, in order to get any kind of customization, new pgs, features, etc. We have to rely solely on the company that originally designed our yahoo store, which isn't good since their turn around time & pricing are absolutely outrageous.

The Yahoo tech support won't help you in this case either, & normal webdesigners' work won't take to our template because it's custom.

I think Yahoo store is fine for really small businesses, but once you get into advanced marketing (like anything that requires Rev share tracking like affilate mktg) the yahoo shopping cart we're on isn't compatible. I don't know about the newest versions, but the one we're on isn't compatible w/ any other analytics program other than yahoo's search optimizer, we found this out after spending almost $13K on another analytics program.