Colorado Web Solutions

Should you hire a developer to design your Yahoo Store?

Posted on July 1st, 2010 by Matt Sampson - Colorado Web Solutions

I’m going to be starting a series of posts that deal with designing and developing a Yahoo store. I believe it’s critical that potential clients understand what a development company can bring to the table. It’s my hope that this series of posts might help people get a better feel for what Yahoo Small Business and Colorado Web Solutions can do to assist with your eCommerce experience.

The Yahoo store platform is one of the best solutions for small business owners to get their products online – fast. The platform continues to evolve from the days of Viaweb to what it is today – a multi-faceted ecommerce platform for small to mid-size businesses. Yahoo continues to deliver a solid store platform and the feature set just keeps on growing – the newest addition being a Floating Cart module.

One of the initial attractions for small business owners toward Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Stores is that they can get their products online without needing to be a programmer or having extensive training in coding and internet marketing. Yahoo provides the hosting, gateway, analytics, ability to upload product content and images and a host of other ecommerce related services for a relatively cheap monthly and per transaction fee.

During the early days of Yahoo’s store platform, it was easy for anyone to purchase a domain and store, throw up a few banners, some products and images – and sales would come. In the years since then, it has become more and more difficult to get the proper exposure and conversion rates for self-managed Yahoo stores. With more and more competition – the need for attractive, well laid out and highly functional stores has become not only more prevalent, but in my opinion, a prerequisite for any successful online store. Unless you are the only site in the world selling your product, you will have more potential selling more with a great design and navigational flow.

That’s where a company Colorado Web Solutions comes in. There are currently a handful of Authorized Yahoo store developers out there. Each developer primarily works with Yahoo! stores and can bring a wealth of experience of knowledge to any small to mid-size business looking to showcase their product line on the Yahoo platform. Here at Colorado Web Solutions our primary specialty is in designing attractive Yahoo stores or re-designing existing Yahoo stores. As our portfolio grows – so does our list of successful clients.

I can’t say enough about the benefits of taking a slow to convert, self-designed Yahoo store and transforming that store into a professional store laid out in a manner consistent with the buyer’s preconceived notions of how a website should function and what a “real” website should look like. Here at Colorado Web Solutions we’ve seen store re-designs double and even triple existing conversion rates within months. On that same token – customers that have never sold on the web have decided rather than hassling on their own for hours upon hours to get their store as they would want – hire us to create a Yahoo Store for them.

In many ways that decision alone has put them way ahead of the game. By choosing Yahoo Store as a platform they already are outpacing many would-be store owners that either decided on a platform that far exceeds their capabilities or chose a cheaper platform in hopes it will perform as good as the “big boys”. OS commerce is a perfect example of this. We see clients over and over that try to build on the “free” platform and are almost ALWAYS unhappy with the results. By choosing Colorado Web Solutions to develop their Yahoo store, they’ll receive not only a top notch development process, but also our accumulated knowledge from selling and promoting on the web for almost 15 years. Every one of our clients will be armed with marketing ideas, how-to tutorials, management ideas and more by the time they complete their Yahoo Store development cycle with us.

My next post will cover in greater detail the advantages of having a professional design firm redesign your existing default Yahoo store.

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