Building a store at Yahoo

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

Copyright © 2002 Richard Seltzer All rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.


This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, MA.

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.


Friday, I started building a store. Monday, it opened for business.

Yes, I had known for years that Yahoo, Amazon, and others offered low-cost online stores. But 1) I was confused by their marketing information, unclear on how much it really cost and how it worked and 2) I didn't have enough merchandise to sell to make it worthwhile.

Now I've built a business selling books on CD ROM. I was getting orders by email and by phone, but I strongly suspected that I was losing some prospective buyers because of the extra step of picking up the phone or getting off the Web to email. So not only did I have stuff to sell, but I also had the incentive it would take to sort out the not-so-clear instructions and invest the time to actually build the store.

I already sell my stuff at Amazon, through their consignment program (Amazon Advantage). That means that my stuff show up as "available within 24 hours" whenever anyone searches for it in their catalog. Hence, if I built a Zshop at Amazon, I would be reaching the same audience I do already, and I would be competing against myself.

So I decided to build at Yahoo, where their cross-searchable mall would theoretically give me access to a new set of customers.

At first I couldn't figure out 1) how do you know who ordered what so you can quickly fulfill? 2) how does the credit card stuff work? 3) what am I really going to end up paying for this? The online help didn't help much, and I couldn't find a way to get a human response to my questions.

Fortunately, they offered a 10-day free trial; so I plunged ahead.

It turns out that once you have signed up, you get access to a Store Manager Web page from which you can easily get a wealth of information: not just the specifics on any order, but also detailed statistics, including: page views, click-through paths, and referrers (where people came from to get to your store).

The online information about merchant credit card accounts was very misleading. It gave the impression that either you had to sign up for a new account with Paymentech or, if you had an existing merchant account, it had to be with a company running a particular software program. I've had a merchant account for about 10 years and have one of those old but reliable Verifone gadgets for inputting orders. My provider told me that to connect directly to Yahoo (so the credit card information would be processed online), I'd need to open a second account with them. That would involve a setup fee of $395 and a monthly fee (in addition to the percent of the revenue from each sale they take). For a small operation like mine, that made no sense. I was tempted to dump my old service and go with Paymentech which charges a monthly service fee of $22.95, plus $0.20 cents per transaction, plus a percentage of each sale that depends on the type of credit card. But that would make it awkward for me to deal with orders that continue to come in by phone and email and snailmail.

Eventually, I deciphered that there was no need to do the credit card transactions automatically online. I could input the credit card info by hand into my old Verifone device. And for the low volumes that I deal with, that wouldn't be too much hassle. But, at first, I got the impression that the only way I could receive the necessary credit card info about the orders that had come in was by encrypted email. To read such email I'd need to buy and learn how to use a program from PGP. Then I finally figured out that I could also get that info from my Store Manager page -- the encrypted email was optional.

So what do I end up paying for this new store of mine?

Building the store was both more difficult and easier than I anticipated. The templates were extremely frustrating, making it difficult for me to make the pages look the way I wanted them to look. Eventually, I figured out that if I changed the number of columns from 3 (the default) to 1, the pages looked and felt more natural. And by trial and error, I determined that, in most places, I could insert basic HTML markup for headlines, bold, bullets, etc. On the plus side, the template automatically added everything that was necessary to make an item orderable at a given price, linking up with a shopping cart. I could add the shipping options and costs, with the rules for when they apply (e.g., different for outside the US). I could also have the sales tax added automatically for Massachusetts residents. It also did a great job with illustrations. All I had to do was upload one image per item, and the picture appeared near the top of the item's description, with the text wrapped around it, and a thumbnail of the illustration showed up next to all the links to that description page, even in the shopping cart.

It takes 3-5 days from the opening of a store for its product info to get into the Yahoo shopping index. Keep in mind that the Yahoo shopping index will not include full text of all your pages, but rather just includes your product names, the first couple lines of each product description, and keywords. Be very careful in writing these. As a default, Yahoo puts the same keywords on all of your product pages. You should put different keywords on each page. To do that, use the "Regular" editor from your Store Manager page. Go to the page you want to change. Click on Edit. Then at the top of the Edit screen, click on Override Variable. Enter your words in the box labelled Keywords. Then click Update.

Under Promote on your Store Manager Page, click on Search Engines, and change all the default selections to "Every Page". Yahoo automatically submits your pages half a dozen important search engines. You want to get the most out of that service. Also, on that Search Engine page, under Export Store Contents, select Enable, so the shopbots can fetch info about your products and prices for inclusion in the databases of comparison shopping sites.

Having done all that, I still wasn't seeing any traffic coming by way of Yahoo's shopping mall. So I sent email to the customer support folks and learned that you have to jump through an extra hoop to get Books, Music, Video, Computers, Electronics, or Videogames into the Yahoo Shopping Network. (I'm surprised that they don't tell you this upfront and provide clear, simple, step-by-step instructions as they do for everything else). Go to http://shopping.yahoo.com/merchant/specifications/products.html for the details. Create an Excel file. Across the top, enter the appropriate category names for your kind of products (as indicated in that document). For books, I entered category, name, code, price, availability, isbn, medium, and creator. Then I filled in the data, one line per product in the appropriate columns. The category was "Book". The name was the title of the book. The code was the same as the ISBN (International Standard Book Number, issued by R.R. Bowker, at exorbitant cost -- a unique number for every variation of the product). The availability was how long customers could expect it would take for us to ship the product (just a numeral, indicating the number of days).   ISBN -- just repeat it. The medium was paperback or hardcover or (in my case) CD. The creator was the author. Then save the file as file type .csv and name it data.csv. Then (for instance, from Windows Explorer) change the file name to just data (with no extension). Then follow the instructions for connecting to the Yahoo store ftp site and uploading your data file to the right directory. This was all far easier than it sounds. The .csv format just means "comma separated values". It's just a string of data with a comma (and no space) between each value. Instead of using Excel, you could just create the file in a word processor and save it as text, so long as you followed that format (paying close attention to the examples Yahoo provides), being sure to include a value for each of the category names for each of your products. Having done this, by the next morning my products appeared just as they should in searches as shopping.yahoo.com.

Now all I need is customers. Please come take a look and buy at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

PS -- The day after the store opened, I got my first order, from someone who had ordered by phone from me before. This person is legally blind uses a text-to-voice conversion device. He says, "The catalog listing and the order form are as clear as any I have used in the past.... All information requested is clearly furnished."


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My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs, and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002). No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve online business success. Reviews.

This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com

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