Yahoo Store Development

Yahoo! Store

Yahoo Store designer & marketer Umang Patel ongoing rants & ravings about Yahoo! Store, RTML, Merchant Solutions, e-commerce for small business folks, conversion rate, and thoughts on his new Yahoo! (USA - India - UK and Germany)

Yahoo! Store Cookies Dropped Cookie Issue
Here's a good article that says people say they delete cookies more than they actually do delete cookies.

"... Atlas's own study showed that people who reported deleting cookies every seven days typically had cookies lasting greater than 45 days.

" This is a good thing. Almost all of the Yahoo! Store ROI tracking software, Google and Overture free PPC conversion tracking, and third party analytics I use are cookie-based. People dropping cookies skews my numbers!

Having trouble tracking all of your Yahoo! Store traffic? "Where did all these folks come from?" It's easy to get spoiled with all the data we have about where the folks who buy our stuff come from...

I've always wondered how many people/orders/customers Yahoo! Store Stats can't track because of cookies getting nuked. Cookies get dropped because surfers either don't accept cookies, delete their cookies by hand, or have some sort of "cookie cruncher" software like Ad-aware that thinks cookies are evil.

When I was out at Search Engine Tools School in beautiful Simi Valley, CA, last month, Bruce Clay said that there were more problems with the firewall issue where certain very popular firewalls were blocking browsers sending REFERRER data . These Yahoo! Store visitors will show in your stats as direct URL type-ins when they could be traffic from your link campaigns, SEO efforts, PPC ads, or other very expensive sources of sales.

Anecdotally, about 40% of my Yahoo! Store orders have specific referrer data that shows the source. When the source of the sale is a search engine, the Yahoo! Store Merchant Order shows me the converting keyword. I obssess over converting keywords.

IDEA -- How about a PPC-only Yahoo! Store where the only way you could get a sale was from your PPC clicks? That way you would KNOW your sales were coming from your PPC.

You could use a NOFOLLOW, NO INDEX tag to keep the duplicate content out of the search engines. You could use the branding from your main site so if folks searched at work but bought at home you would still get the sale. You could also use one of your alternate domains (like yourDASHcompanyDASHname.com) so if folks bookmarked you, later sales would show as PPC sales.

Back in the days when I was trying to learn all about affiliate marketing, I stayed away from retailers with affiliate programs who had short cookies that only tracked sales for 1 or 2 days. If a retailer only gave affiliates credit for a sale they delivered in the first 48 hours of the visit, how many of "my" sales were happening on day 3, 13, 33 or further on out?

Then I went to Commission Junction University and Todd Crawford told me that something like 95% of CJ sales happened within the first 48 hours, so not to worry about the affiliates with short cookies.

NEXT, GO TO THE YAHOO STORE EDITOR. MAKE NECESSARY YAHOO STORE EDITOR TWEAKS

I went to the STORE EDITOR, and changed the EDITOR to the ADVANCED version by clicking on the little red arrow to the right of all the EDITOR NAVBUTTONS. I also turned the "FIND" on under CONTROLS and I did my usual Store Editor tweaks.


Yahoo Store School?
A former Yahoo Store owner wrote me a great email. I thought my reply would be a good post here.

Thanks for your note. I'm at a weird spot in my career.

I have more work than I can ever do, and my phone is still ringing off the hook. It's almost impossible to hire folks to do what I do, and I'm not that great a manager. It's all so intuitive. I'm a "feel" player.

These days I'm doing these revenue share projects where I get a % of sales from the Yahoo Stores I work with, and spend the rest of the time working on our Yahoo Stores.


Should I have multiple Yahoo Stores or focus on a single, big store?
(adapted from an email from a prospective client)

From 1997 through last year I would have said have multiple web stores. I guess it's about time for diminishing returns.

Now the search engines seem to know that a "network" of sites is really all one big site (if you cross link 'em) and interlinked sites get nuked all the time. So anytime I develop a spin-off store, I treat it as a separate business.

I still believe in "if it's good for the user, do it..."

I would rather have 1 website with x links rather than 8 websites with x/8 links. I have one client with 5 Yahoo Stores and the sales breakdown ~80%, 16%, 2%, 1%, <1%.

The smaller stores were focused on micro niches or used to segregate PPC buys from the big store, but the last 12-18 months have been spent almost 100% on the "big site." It has been a much better return on my time. Better to build one or two brands than to have five hooks in the SERPS with no brands.


Personally? I would open up a Yahoo Store because it's SO easy to open and update, and when sales hit $1,000,000 a year, then think about migrating to another platform, but I'm biased based upon 8 years of Yahooing.

Yahoo Store Converting Keywords
Extracting converting keywords from orders by product

Here's a cool feature that most Yahoo! Store owners don't really know about. You know the MANAGER > STATISTICS > SALES report shows you what products are selling well, but did you know you can use it to harvest converting keywords by product? Yep.
You can sort the various products by [By Count of Items Sold] , [By Count of Orders], or [By Revenue]. When there are 50 or fewer orders for a product in a given date range, the [By Count of Orders] number actually links back to a summary of all the original orders for a product. When you can see 50 orders for the same product, you can see some really cool thing, converting keywords being the coolest! You can usually see where the customer came from (Referrer), and what they searched for (Yahoo Rev-Share Url).

Here's how to get your Converting Keywords out of your Sales reports.


1. Go to your Yahoo! Store Manager. Only products with less than 50 orders in a given time frame have a link to the orders. Why exactly? My guess is that since it takes a while for the MANAGER to generate these pages of orders, more than 50 would take too long or overtax the STORE MANAGER server.

On your bestselling products, you'll have more than 50 orders in a year. How can you see all the orders? Shorten the timeframe to get the number of orders down to less than 50. Try the last 180 days (6 months), but if you have a ton of orders, you can do it month by month for the last 6 months. Unfortunately, Sales reporting doesn't allow a date range like using Graphs does.