Cyber Monday Tip #10: Yahoo Store Shopping Feeds

Posted on November 24th, 2009 by Matt Sampson - Colorado Web Solutions

Part 10 of our month long Cyber Monday Prep Tips Series. Every day, we have been giving you one small piece of advice to check, fix or confirm within your Yahoo! Store in preparation for Cyber Monday 2009. View Past Yahoo! Store Tips.

Cyber Monday Yahoo! Store Preparation Tip #10: Check your product feeds for shopping engines

I’m going to give you a nice simple tip today. You have no excuses with this one. Today we are going to check your product catalog feeds and make sure that you have them turned on for the shopping comparison engines. In a nutshell, these XML feeds allow other sites to pull your products into their comparison engines and then link back to your site with new customers. I would recommend that every merchant that sells items to the general public turn their product feeds on.

Here’s how to turn your Yahoo Store shopping feeds on.

• Log into your Yahoo! Store’s Manager
• Under the PROMOTE heading in the second row of options you will see “Search Engines” – click that.
• You will see three rows of radio buttons. Ensure that ALL THREE are checked as “Enabled”
• Click DONE
• By checking those three buttons you are turning on your sitemap and allowing your products to be listed in comparison engines.
• Return to your Store Manager main page. If necessary, publish your order settings.
• If your site map was not previously turned on, you will need to publish it once to build it. If your sitemap (the first radio button above) was already on, you can skip this step. You’re done.
• To publish your site map enter your store editor. Click on the VARIABLES button. Then Click UPDATE. Now Publish. You’re finished.

Would you like more control over your product datafeeds? Are you submitting your products to Google Base, Shopping.com etc? Read This!

For those merchants that want to take their product feed and overall marketing to a new level, we highly suggest using a datafeed service designed specifically for Yahoo Stores. We have tried them all and hands down, our favorite service is Go Data Feed. They can help you automatically submit your products (with the correct categories per engine!) to all of the major shopping comparison engines. Free engines, paid engines, they support just about everything! By far the best way to get your Yahoo Store products listed correctly in Google Base / Google Products / Froogle.

If you are interested, here’s some more information on our website:
http://www.coloradowebsolutions.com/yahoo-store-godatafeed.html

I hope you enjoyed this super simple Yahoo Store tip today. Don’t wait. Get it done.

Tomorrow I’ll be back with some thoughts on Holiday Shipping Deadlines.