posted on June 6, 2001 05:30:49 AM
I mean a store at Yahoo's virtual shopping mall where they charge $100/month. If you have, how have the sales/profits/traffic been compared to eBay? I guess my question is, is it worth the expense? Saw a newsletter that promoted it yesterday. Figure I could shift my mounting eBay associated fees to footing the bill for a Yahoo Store if it's more profitable. Do you offer your own payment options or is it Yahoo PayDirect?
Yahoo has many times more traffic than eBay, but certainly not to its auction site. Maybe they're all frequenting the Yahoo shopping mall???
posted on June 6, 2001 06:31:11 AM
I had a yahoo store for a little while. I thought that it would drive traffic my way. It didn't. Most of my stores' traffic came from the fact they were listed high in AOL and other search engines.
Another thing that I and several merchants I spoke with found annoying is their customer service policy.
Pretty much they have started telling merchants how to handle their customers.
Example: If someone places an order and their card is rejected, they can complain to yahoo shopping customer service. The merchant is then contacted by yahoo and given 3 (?) days to respond. If they don't respond to the complaint they will be taken out of yahoo shopping search results. If this pattern continues they will cancel your store.
The most annoying thing about this is, the merchant has already contacted the customer to let them know the problem. Some people just love to complain and yahoo shopping encourages complaining. Yahoo interfering with customer service just interfers with a merchant's ability to handle his business.
I would not ship unless the billing address matched that on file with the card company. Our emails to customers would reflect why their order was not being shipped. I had one lady complain to yahoo 8 times about the same order, that I refused to ship. They wanted me to respond everytime to them with what was going on. I finally wrote and told them to cancel my store. I told them that my time could better be used serving my customers and not writing to yahoo.
Another thing is their ratings program (it was voluntary, I don't know if it still is). Anyone that places an order with you can rate you. If you participate in the rating systme your store is listed higher in the shopping serach results.
One merchan that I know sold items that are very desirable to overseas buyers. His store stated that he did not ship outside the U.S. and his yahoo shopping cart was also set to only accept orders from the U.S. only. However foreign shoppers could get around this by ordering as if they were in U.S. and then putting their correct address in the comments section on his order form. He would not ship to them. Yahoo would send these people an email to rate him. They would all give him rotten ratings because he would not ship overseas. Yahoo would still count this against his overall rating eventhough his store policy was not to ship overseas and these people never actually purchased anything from him. These rating would show up next to his store name. He canceled his store also.
Another thing is that in many categories big name retailers show up first. No matter how bad their service or merchandise. Yahoo calls them "featured merchants" and in search results they always come first. In some cats you can have 5 star customer service ratings and still be many pages deep in the results.
My advice is find a good webhost and find a shopping cart system and set it up on your site. Try to get listed in the search engines. Chances are most of your business will come from search engines anyway.
posted on June 6, 2001 08:49:15 AM
yahoo does not send out emails requesting shoppers to rate the merchant until days after shipment is made.
merchant ,only the merchant can mark the order as shipped.
so how can overseas shoppers rate him if he has not shipped any item ?and he has not taken their money??
posted on June 6, 2001 09:16:48 AM
Adding on to what shop4shoes stated about your own web store, there are a lot of free web stores. One that I know of is ezwebstore. I set it up with mal's free ecommerce shopping cart.
All I needed was a Unix web host with cgi-bin and sendmail. The rest was easy to setup.
posted on June 6, 2001 09:56:13 AM
It's easy to e-commerce enable your Website for free if you want. Mals ecommerce offers a free service that provides an integratable shopping cart and they handle all the backend cart processing on their site. Also offers an extremely professional look and feel that integrates easily with your site and a ton of other nice features. It can integrate with PayPal's Web accept service and merchant gateways. He doesn't charge any fees for hosting or anything. It's the only complete and free solution I've found. I set up my site in a day using their tutorial.
The problem with setting up your own e-commerce site is driving traffic to it. Where the heck do you get it from??? I figured Yahoo's Web Mall stores, and the items integrated into Yahoo's search feature would offer large amounts of built-in traffic --- something you'll have to work at building for your own external store.
Yahoo sends out emails to everyone that places an order. Their emails don't select between shipped and non-shipped.
They have no way of knowing who has paid or what is shipped unless the merchant uses their automatic email notification system.
I forgot to add in my previous post that if you manage to get traffic from their search results, yahoo wants a percentage of your sales over and above their store fees. They collect these fees on sales that can be directly attributed to yahoo shopping links. I don't remember the exact amount you had to make before that kicked in.
One of my sites has a listing in the regular yahoo directory. That sends me a good bit of traffic. In fact it sent me more than the yahoo shopping directory.
In the past 6 days out of nearly 1300 hits to this one site of mine the traffic came from:
Yahoo directory & Search includes google results: 413
AOL search: 258
Excite search: 133
Lycos search: 10
You can have Yahoo reveiw your site an list it within 7 days for $199. This is a good way to go. If you choose to do this make sure you don't have broken links or mispellings. They will reject you and you be out of your money.
posted on June 10, 2001 05:16:27 PM
why would anyone want to block overseas customer in his cybershop?the whole allure of selling in cyberspace is to sell to anyone from anywhere around the world,provided that his money is good!!
yahoo shopping is a place more for new items,folks looking for wedding gifts,graduation gifts,engagement rings,birthday gifts,electronic ,clothers,wall papers etc .
posted on July 2, 2001 08:13:38 PM
yahoo shop is a class act,ebay auctions is mesmerising.
yahoo auction stinks and ebay shop is a disgrace.
how about merging the two -ebay auctions with yahoo shops/
think of all the traffic coming through,all we need is to bomb the AOL chat rooms so they will emerge from aol and come to internet.
if so,we will have 90% of the us traffic.
posted on July 3, 2001 06:54:42 AM
We're in the process of opening a $100 a month Yahoo Store as a "branch site"; we have two well established and well trafficked independent websites.
For the $100 monthly we get: up to 50 items in the store, easy uploading of inventory from a database, a completely customizable storefront, and NO transaction fees. Since we have a secure server, we can continue to do our own real time credit card processing - this was a very important factor for us since we do our own fraud screening. You don't have to use PayDirect.
Yahoo Stores are NOT automatically included in Yahoo Shopping. You apply for that separately. If you are listed in Yahoo Shopping, there is a 2% transaction fee, but it only kicks in if you sell more than $5000 in a month.
posted on October 15, 2001 05:48:44 PM
I don't know how I stumbled accross this thread...However, it is relevant with many people complaining about sales slumps on ebay.
I had a yahoo store. They are very easy to customize and they look great if you use some good graphics.
When I opened my store, all merchants were automatically listed in Yahoo shopping. I did not get much benefit from being listed in shopping. The large retailers always came up first in the search engines.
I really like their shopping cart and automatic order confirmation emails. It is great. They also do some fraud screening for you. There is more detail about that on their store site.
why would anyone want to block overseas customer in his cybershop?the whole allure of selling in cyberspace is to sell to anyone from anywhere around the world,provided that his money is good!!
I can think of two very good reasons:
1)Credit card fraud is very high with overseas orders.
2) Many manufacturers give sellers territories. I have items that I am not allowed to sell to Japan, Germany, and France, because other sellers have that territory. Selling outside your territory will get you dropped from that manufacturers retailers list.
The allure of selling online for me is that I find it fun.
Yahoo is very very good compared to ebay. I do find their customer service policy annoying. I got a negative rating from a lady who wanted to use her mother's card to pay for her order. The billing address she gave was incorrect. I called the card company and they contacted her mother. She not only did not have permission to use her mother's card, but her mother had no idea her daughter had the card number. She was allowed to rate me eventhough I never shipped her one thing. She also wrote to yahoo customer service and claimed that her card was illegally charged. I had to respond to those accusations. She had no card and I never charged her mother.
I stopped using yahoo. I prefer to handle my own customer service without outside interference.
posted on October 15, 2001 06:26:30 PM
i have a yahoo shop since may,2001.
i paid 300 a month for a shop with 1000 items and 22.95 a month to paymentech for providing a shopping cart and process my transactions with visa and master charge.
i also accept yahoo direct,paypal,billpoint,cash,money order and check.
it took me 5 full days to have a shop ready for business and i am not going to tell you how many hours i put in per day!!
i was willing to lose money for 6 months just to see if it works or not.
fortunately it started paying for itself from month one,no cigar but customers buy from my shop for themselves and as gifts.
they come from all over-mostly us but some from asia and some from germany,canada.
since october 1.2001,yahoo has made some pricing changes,49.95 for hosting your shop and 10 cents per item in your shop.
a 1/2 transaction fee when item sold and 3 1/2 % if the sale came thru yahoo shopping network-such as yahoo search,yahoo directory and yahoo shopping.
most of my orders do come thru yahoo shopping
network.
business is slow everywhere and my yahoo shop sales is not as good as i would like,but this new pricing structure enables me to save some money,easily 100 dollars per month.
yahoo does give more attention to the big shops,but if you have something competitive in quality and price,customers will come to your shop.
i cannot afford professional photographer while most of the big shops do,but the quality of my items are just as good and the prices are reasonable compared to theirs.
so in the nutshell,if you are tired of listing an item for 7 -10 days and sell it at liquidation value,consider yahoo ,with the new pricing policy it has become more affordable and there is no shop layout like yahoo,amzn and ebay shops are like the latrines compared to a yahoo shop.
(note -paymentech provides shopping cart,authorises and process your cc transaction and send you a statement at the end of each month,but visa/mc discount fee is extra and there is a 15 dollars minimum for combined discount fee)
so if you have a shop with 1000 items and none sold,you still have a cost of 49.95 plus 10 cents x1000 = 100 dollars,plus 22.95 paymentech plus 15.00 discount fee.which comes to 187.90.
yahoo shoppers are not keen on leaving feedback,most prefer to use their credit cards and they dont bicker over shipping charge.
i offer gift wrap for 1.25 extra and 10.00 extra for shipping overseas,altho i have given them either a partial refund or a coupon when the item is small .
i was scammed by one customer,and she resides in good old usa,but things like this happen when you have a shop.
yahoo shops are able to block out certain countries and i choose not to do business with the eastern european,africa countries.
what more can i say,if you are committed to selling in cyberspace and you believe you have good merchandise,you should consider yahoo shop.
all these free sites,cheaper sites mean nothing if there is no sale,and these days only a few sites yahoo,ebay and amzn produces results for us.
