Part I: Yahoo! Store Basics:

Chapter 1:The Nickel Tour of Yahoo! Store

Store Builder + Order Manager + Domain + Hosting + Email

What is Yahoo Store?

Yahoo! Store = Editor + Manager

What is Merchant Solutions?

Merchant Solutions = Yahoo! Store + Hosting + Email

Your Published Web Store (your html pages)

Editor-built Pages

i.e. Home Page, Section Pages, & Product Pages

Utility Pages

Your Shopping cart, Search, Info, Privacy Policy

Secure Checkout Pages

Shipping Info, Billing Info, Order Summary,Confirmation Page

Web Hosting Pages

Anything you want on the web   

Store Builder Overview

Two Ways to Build your Store

Yahoo! Store Editor OR Store Tags on Hosted Pages

Building a 5-10 Item Store

Building a store with a fluctuating product mix

Building a 10,000 item store

Special kinds of stores

Apparel, Electronics, Computers

Store Editor - Using the online store builder, no html required

What is the store EDITOR?

Manages Look & Feel

Controls Design Elements

Edit Product Info

Yahoo! Store Classic / Legacy Store

RTML templating language

Advanced, Proprietary, & Arcane, but Cool!

Store Tags with offline web site development tools. New! (Since late 2003)

Store Tags tie into your product database w/ proprietary code

Using third party tools to develop "normal" html pages

Plugging store code into those pages

Other STORE TAGS methodologies

Using PHP, PERL and other ways to develop pages 

Managing Products Overview

Using the EDITOR to manage products

Using the CATALOG MANAGER   

Uploading product data to either

Whether or not to use the Inventory functionality

Store Manager Overview

Edit

Store Editor, Catalog Manager, Store Tag Hub

Process

Orders, Catalog Requests

Statistics

Page Views, Sales, References, Graphs, Reports, Repeats

Order Settings

Order Form, Order Emails, Shipment Status, Configure Inventory, Pay Methods, Shipping Manager, Tax Rates, Foreign Orders, Risk Tools, Shipping & Tax Test, Auctions Checkout,

Site Settings

Account Info, Access, Preferences, Domain Names (OLD), Customer Access, Ratings

Promote

Email Marketing, Mailing Lists, Search Engines, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Shopping, Affiliate Program, Overture Tags

Web Hosting Overview

What is Yahoo! Web hosting?

Traditional html pages

uploaded via FTP or via FILE MANAGER

Building Pages with Store Tags

Using offline tools WYSIWYG Editors

Using the FILE MANAGER or FTP

Domains Overview

Managing Domain & Subdomains

All About Domains

Registrars, Nameservers, Hostnames, Whois, and More

Registration Info - Whois info

Advanced DNS settings

Create and edit advanced DNS settings like A, CNAME, and MX records.

Watch where you point that thing: Domain options for YS Owners

Choosing the Point of Origin

Store Editor Index Page

Hosting Index Page

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/domains/domainfeatures/forwarding/forwarding-01.html

New! The 301 Permanent Redirect

Solves duplicate content penalty Issues

Email Overview

Create Email Addresses

Configure your Email Accounts

Set up your Email Client

Chapter 2: Planning your Online Small Business

Maximizing your marketing efforts to get what you want out of your Yahoo! Store.

"How Do I Get More Traffic That Converts?"

Find the most popular search terms buyers use to find what you sell.

Make your site come up as high as possible in the search results for those specific words and phrases

Track these results and compare how well you rank with your traffic and sales.

How do I discover my Top Keyword Phrases?

Yahoo! Store references show what phrases are already drawing traffic and sales

Export CONVERTING KEYWORDS from the Y!Ref field in ORDERS + EMAILS

Look Outside Your Store:

Find ALL relevant keyword phrases using multiple sources

Use Online KEYWORD TOOLS

Wordtracker

Overture Search Suggestion Tool

Google Adwords

Treliian’s New Tool

How Do I Decide What Products to Sell?

Do Market Research on What Sells

Target a specific niche in your industry

Pick a profitable, popular niche to focus your business on, but not one too broad, or with too many competitors.

Competitive advantages -- the JULIA email

Distribution: Do you have a competitive advantage? Better pricing? Exclusive deals?

Product Knowledge – Do you know more about your products than anyone else

Domain Name – Do you have a wicked cool domain name?

The most important aspect of starting a web-based business is FOCUS.

Put together a list of targeted keywords, and search for marketing opportunities on the Net.

How to Pick the Right Products.

Pick a good price point - from $30 - 200 average sale

Test the popularity of your search terms in the various search engines and keyword tools.

Use WORDTRACKER to see number of daily searches

Use WORDTRACKER or OVERTURE to see what the top 3-5 or PREMIUM bids are

Create a GOOGLE ADWORDS account and start testing some ads now to see how many impressions you get on a daily basis

Create a list of product categories and the specific brands you can focus on to maximize your business.

See what folks are paying for your generic keywords

Prioritize your product focus based upon your interest, price point, margin, competition level, or internet opportunity.

Most folks get about a 30% margin

You need to make $20 a box IMHO

Price check your competitors. See if they are making a profit based upon what you pay wholesale.

Use FROOGLE

Use Yahoo! Shopping

Look at the completed auctions on eBay to see if folks are moving product on the #1 auction site

Create Your Marketing Action Plan -

Get Your Top KEYWORD PHRASES with estimated number of daily searches

Get the current PPC bid value of those words using WORDTRACKER

Create a VALUE MATRIX by multiplying demand times the value to see the

See how many site are optimizing for their those phrases by using GOOGLE’s advanced operators DOUBLECHECK:

ALLINTITLE: and INANCHOR:

Write an optimized directory listing for Yahoo!, DMOZ, and other directories

Create specific page names and item descriptions for specific search engines

Create a PPC strategy (Google Adwords/Overture)

Look at other advertising options

Design your site to get and convert this traffic

Make your site’s copy compelling.

Have a professional look and feel.

Be “real.”

Tweak Your Store to Maximize Results

Monitoring and adjust site to increase sales

Maximize conversion rate

What products are converting the best?

Where is your best traffic coming from?

What keywords are driving the most sales?

Other Cool Stuff

What if you have a relatively new Yahoo! Store?

Look outside more than inside

How to Get a Competition Ranking Report for the directories & major search engines

How to see what's really selling on Y!Shopping

Yahoo! Shopping Searches TOP 100

The What’s Selling Page

Shows 10 at a time. Just hit REFRESH.

We scraped the results and it’s scary!

How to Do Deep Recon on Competitors

Use Alexa to get traffic info

Look at their WHOIS data

Place a test order

Send an email and ask some good questions

Call them up and ask noisy questions

Call their suppliers

Scrape their site and analyze their keywords

Reverse engineer their backlinks