Colorado Web Solutions

Customize Yahoo! Store Order Confirmation Subject Lines

Posted on June 3rd, 2009 by Matt Sampson - Colorado Web Solutions

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions released a few new upgrades over the weekend that are relatively small but carry great impact. The most signifigant one to me is that ability to change your Yahoo! Store order confirmation email subject lines. It’s not perfect, they still force most of it on you, BUT, you are able to change the YHST part of the subject line to a different prefix and they have given you the ability to add “from MERCHANT NAME” at the end of the subject line. So in theory, your subject line could look something like this:

Subject: order CoffeeCakes-654383 from CoffeeCakes.com

We know it’s not a mind-blowing feature, but I felt that it was very worth mentioning in here because being able to customize that subject line in the order confirmation emails allows for one more level of class that merchants with Yahoo! were not able to achieve previously. I’ll include Yahoo!’s post below along with a link for more information so you can make this change to your sites. It’s extremely simple to change and I would HIGHLY recommend that you do so as soon as possible.

Have a great day -

Matt Sampson
CEO
Colorado Web Solutions
http://www.coloradowebsolutions.com

Here is the original post from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions:

May 2009 Release Notes

As Memorial Day festivities were winding down earlier this week, here at Yahoo! Small Business, we were keeping the festive spirit alive with the release of several new feature enhancements for your Yahoo! stores. With some of these enhancements having been on the “wish list” of many merchants for awhile, we hope you’ll be just as happy to start using them with your store operations, as we are to tell you about them.

Customize buyer-facing order number prefixes

By default, order numbers displayed to your store customers are prefixed with your store ID. For example, if a customer’s order number is 792, and your store ID is yhst-12345678911011, the order number is displayed to the customer as yhst-12345678911011-792 on order confirmation and order status pages in checkout, in order and shipment confirmation emails, and on printed order materials (order invoice and packing slip).

Now, you can customize what comes before the order number, using the new “Order Number Prefix” field in the Shipment & Order Status section of Store Manager. If your store name is “Widget World” and you want to replace the store ID in the order number with “widget-world,” you can now go right ahead. Your customized order number prefix will be shown in the buyer-facing locations noted above. (Merchants should note that for printed order materials, the custom order number prefix will appear on materials printed to PDF, but not on materials printed to HTML.)

Replace your store ID in order numbers using the “Order Number Prefix” field.

Custom order number prefix displayed in checkout.

Specify a sender name for order and shipment status emails

Order and shipment status emails use a default sender name in the “From” field, pulled from the “Title” variable in your Store Manager. Should you wish to customize the “From” field, you may do so using the “Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails” field in the Shipment & Order Status section of Store Manager. So if your “Title” variable was “All Paws Up – Pet Supplies for the Pampered Puppy,” and you wanted your email sender name to simply be “All Paws Up,” you can change this using the “Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails” field.

Customize the sender name used for order and shipment confirmation emails using the “Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails” field.

If you haven’t yet enabled order and shipment status emails and want to learn more about setting these up, please see our “Configuring shipping and order confirmation emails” help page.

Limit shipping address state selection in checkout

Some merchants sell products that can only be shipped to specific states. For example, a store that sells wine must honor state shipping laws that restrict wine from being shipped to certain states. Other times, you may wish to only accept orders from within the continental U.S. Previously, you needed to ensure you had no shipping rates that would allow these orders to be placed, and your checkout may have shown U.S. territories as well as states.

To address these needs, we’ve made it possible to limit which states a buyer can select when providing shipping address information during checkout. When a merchant has defined specific ship-to states in the Foreign Orders section of Store Manager, buyers will be required to select a state from a drop-down list that lists the selected states only (or the selected states and all Canadian provinces, if the store also ships to Canada).

Drop-down list of selected ship-to states in checkout.

To find out how to use this new feature, please see our online help page.

New “Minimum Purchase Includes” option in Coupon Manager

While shoppers enjoy store discounts, it’s important for your business to maintain certain margins when offering these discounts. Coupon Manager’s target items capability allows you to choose which store items to include in a coupon offer, so you can avoid discounts on low-margin items. In combination with this, you can also require that a minimum purchase amount be met in order to redeem a coupon, which helps you maintain certain margins – even when a discount has been applied.

Now, when a coupon includes target items, you can also choose which store items will count toward the required minimum purchase amount: only those target items included in the coupon offer, or all items in an order. When creating or editing a coupon that requires a minimum purchase amount, you can set this option in the “Minimum Purchase Includes” section of the Create/Edit Coupon screen. By choosing to include only items included in the coupon offer, low-margin products that may be excluded from the offer can also be excluded from counting toward the required minimum purchase amount.

“Minimum Purchase Includes” option in Coupon Manager.

By default, this option is set to include all store items. Merchants should note that when editing coupons, the option to count only target items included in a coupon offer toward the minimum purchase amount will be disabled if target items have not yet been defined.

PayPal Express Checkout: shipping address options

We’ve made some changes to your PayPal Express Checkout options, to address common questions about the shipping address settings. First, the “Allow Override” and “Match Address” labels have been replaced with “Buyer-specified Address” and “Replace With PayPal Address,” to better reflect what each option means:

• Buyer-specified Address – Always use the shipping address entered by the buyer during checkout, even if the address is not associated with the buyer’s PayPal account.
• Replace With PayPal Address – Replace the address entered by the buyer during checkout with the address from their PayPal account (note that the buyer may choose to modify this address upon returning to checkout from PayPal).

PayPal Shipping Address settings and new “Flag Address Mismatch” option.

With either setting, you may now opt to flag orders with a shipping address that does not match the buyer’s PayPal address, using the “Flag Address Mismatch (no auto-capture of order)” option. These orders will be marked as “pending review” in Order Manager, and auto-capture of funds for these orders will not occur. Merchants can then review the order, and choose to manually capture funds, or to cancel the order.

We look forward to bringing you several more releases this year, and continue our wish to be a partner in your online success. If you have any comments about these feature enhancements, or other recent releases, be sure to let us know.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Related articles:

1. Thoughts on Yahoo Store Automatic Order Processing
2. How to Customize your Yahoo Store’s Packing Slips
3. The subject line elevator pitch
4. Yahoo! Store Upgrade List for October 2009
5. Yahoo! Store Release Notes – July 2009