Yahoo! Store Announces New Features for March 2008

Posted on March 17th, 2008 by Colorado Web Solutions - Yahoo Store Developers and Designers

Greetings everyone. As some of you may know, Yahoo Store just released a new round of updates to the Yahoo Merchant Solutions Platform. While none of these new features are ground breaking, they are all very effective in their niche of need. Some help with Anti-Fraud in Yahoo Stores, some are for a better presentation and some are to assist you in maximizing your average order size. Here’s a run down from Yahoo on the new features:

American Express CID Codes

Merchants now have the option to process CID codes for shoppers paying with American Express. First Data Merchant Services (FDMS) recently added support for American Express CID (Card Identification) codes and we have updated Checkout Manager to allow for displaying this field and passing the value through FDMS to American Express.

Merchants who would like to use the CID code when accepting American Express will need to contact American Express directly to enable processing of the code and then publish your order settings. If your orders show a response code of “P” (Not Processed) then American Express has not enabled CID support for your merchant account yet. Please consult our Risk Tools help for more information about this feature.

Default Product Image Format Selection

Ever wonder why your product images may look different from the original image after uploading? Currently in the Store Editor, if you upload images larger than the values specified in your Image variables for product images, your original image is resized and converted to GIF format. With our upcoming release there will be two new variables added which allow you to control the default file format for resized images. This allows you the flexibility to choose the format that best meets your needs, including GIF, JPEG, or PNG.

You can also choose a default value for images generated by the Store Editor for navigation buttons or display text; this is more commonly used in the 2.0 Editor templates that generate images for side navigation buttons. The default setting of GIF will remain so no changes will be made automatically to your images. You can find these new variables in the Image Dimensions section of the Variables page. For more information please refer to Help.

View by Specific Date Range

We have added a date range option to the Page Views, Sales, References, and Searches reports. With this feature if you are running a short term promotion that launches on a specific day and runs for a specific period, you can set the date ranges to correspond to that period and view and export the results to help determine the impact for that period. Likewise, if you make a major change to your site, such as a redesign or change to checkout, you can run two reports with the date ranges set before and after the date of the change to help determine what the impact may have been.

Two Other Changes for Cross-Sell

We have also made improvements to our Cross-Sell Manager to provide merchants who have this feature with the flexibility and insight into cross-sell performance they have requested. We will dedicate a separate blog post just to these improvements, but here is a quick preview of the changes:

• Customizable labels for price, sale price and cross-sell discount on product and cart page cross-sell listings. Consult Cross-Sell help for more details.
• New graphs available in the Graphs page to show the performance of automated rules, manual (merchant created) rules, and both combined so merchants can decide on where to prioritize their cross-sell efforts.

So look for another post which will get into all of the details for the improved Cross-Sell features shortly. We look forward to bringing you many more releases this year and continue our wish to be a true partner in your online success.

If you need assistance with any of these new features, please let us know. At Colorado Web Solutions our business is Yahoo! Stores and we’re always ready to take on the next new feature or project you can throw at us.