Colorado Web Solutions

Yahoo! Store Upgrade List for October 2009

Posted on October 12th, 2009 by Matt Sampson - Colroado Web Solutions CEO

Yahoo! Small Business released some minor upgrades this weekend and we wanted to let you know about them. The most signifigant of these changes is the automatic display of cross sell items on products that are not orderable. This is a fantastic way to steer your customers to products that you do have in stock and if you have activated your cross sell features, your store will take care of this with no effort on your part. (if you have not activated Yahoo! Store Cross Sell yet, you can read more here)

Here is the entire release and information directly from the Official Yahoo! Store Blog:

October 2009 Release Notes

Early yesterday morning, the team here at Yahoo! Small Business rolled out a few new feature enhancements that we’re happy to let you know about.

First, merchants who use the Simple Promotional Email tool can now include coupon offers targeted for specific items when sending an email to their customers. So, if you’d like to send an email featuring three items (or items from three categories), and wish to include a coupon offer in your email that is specific to those items or item categories only, you can now do so. Or, if you have a coupon offer you wish to extend but don’t want to include certain items from your store in this offer (to avoid discounts on low-margin items, for example), you can do that too. If you choose to include a targeted coupon offer in your email, we recommend ensuring that any items featured in your email are also included in the coupon offer.

Next, there is a new option for your product catalog feeds that are downloaded by shopping comparison engines and other third-party sites, such as Google Product Search. In the Search Engines section of Store Manager, along with the options to enable or disable your product catalog feeds, you now have the option to “enable but do not syndicate” the feed — meaning the product catalog feed is enabled, but will not be readable by shopping comparison engines or other sites. This option is designed for merchants who wish to manage their own product catalog feeds.

Product catalog feed options in the Search Engines section of Store Manager.

You may also notice a change in the Order Settings column of Store Manager. The “Fax/Email” link has been renamed “Email,” and the subsequent section of Store Manager now provides a secondary “Email to:” field and delivery settings. Custom email delivery options may be set for each of these fields, including the frequency of the order emails, and the format you wish to receive these in. Merchants who previously used the faxed orders feature may wish to receive orders in PDF format, in place of the faxed copies of orders they used to receive. You can choose to send orders by email to one email address or a set of email addresses in one format (for example, in PDF format, with “Immediately” as the delivery frequency), while also sending order emails to a second email address or set of email addresses with the ability to select a different format and frequency.

New secondary “Email to” field in the Email section of Store Manager.

If you’ve ever received calls or emails from customers who have experienced problems entering gift certificate codes during checkout due to commonly confused letters and numbers being part of code, you may be happy to learn that we’ve changed how gift certificate codes are generated. The character set used when generating gift certificate codes now excludes letters and numbers that are frequently mistaken for similar letters and numbers (for example, 0 and O, 1 and L, 6 and G, and so on). With this change, we’ve aimed to make the checkout experience easier for customers using gift certificates, and to help decrease the number of customer inquiries made to merchants regarding gift certificate codes.

Lastly, one more housekeeping item for merchants using Cross-Sell on product pages to note: Cross-Sell items will now be displayed on product pages for unorderable items. When an item is not available to be ordered, Cross-Sell provides a great opportunity to suggest alternative items that, if aware of, a customer may choose to purchase instead. If you’re a Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant and don’t have Cross-Sell enabled, now’s a great time to start using it as you get ready for the holidays. Read up on optimal cross-selling for the holidays in a previous post to the blog.

We’d be happy to hear your feedback on these enhancements, and encourage you to write in with your comments. As always, we appreciate the opportunity to bring you these enhancements, and hope that these, along with other the features released throughout this year, are helpful in your preparations for the holiday shopping season.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Matt Sampson | CEO | Colorado Web Solutions
http//www.ColoradoWebSolutions.com

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Related articles:

1. Yahoo! Store Release Notes – July 2009
2. Yahoo! Store Upgrades Coupon Manager (finally!)
3. Yahoo! Store Announces New Features for March 2008
4. Customize Yahoo! Store Order Confirmation Subject Lines
5. Yahoo! Merchant Solutions released Cross Sell Additions