If you have a Yahoo Store and do not host your images somewhere outside your Yahoo Store there are serious issues that will affect your listings on sales sites including one that is especially important to your success: Google Product Search aka Google Base (formerly called Froogle).
If you don’t know or have not paid someone to upgrade your Yahoo Store and host your images somewhere else this issue affects your store.
Fortunately, there is already a solution you really need to know about. That solution is provided by YourStoreWizards (formerly Y Store Tools) and ironically we were using them, but we would not know what we do now if we had not changed feed providers and come back to them.
It has taken months, dozens of hours and emails, and increased costs for one of my favorite Yahoo Store owners so if you find this information valuable I ask that you repay them by visiting their excellent online personalized gift store.
I finally know enough about how Yahoo Stores work to determine what the issues are and share them.
If you have a Yahoo Store it is IMPERATIVE that you read and understand this post.
If you know anyone who owns a Yahoo Store do them a huge favor and send them a link to this post. It will save them a lot of money and increase their sales.
Special thanks to Jim at YourStoreWizards (Twitter), Yahoo Store Developer Michael Vorel of VastPlanet, and most importantly Yahoo Store Expert Rob Snell, author of the book Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies
Specifically, I had to determine why the feeds from GoDataFeed did not have thumbnail images in them (since the store did) and why traffic dropped from Google Product Search.
Here is the distilled version:
- The default hosting in Yahoo stores has drawbacks and that is what most Yahoo stores use. Two major issues that affect feeds is that there are no thumbnail images in a standard Yahoo Store and the URL of your images in your store actually changes. (If anyone knows why a Yahoo store would do something with such negative consequences I would love to hear from you!)
- YourStoreWizards actually pulls the images from a Yahoo store, hosts them on their servers for use in feeds, and creates thumbnail images which they also host and use for the feeds. Other Feed solution providers do not choose to provide that service and should only be used if you host your images outside your Yahoo store (which is recommended but can be a major undertaking with additional risks and expense).
- If your images are currently stored at Yahoo since there are no thumbnail images in your store so no feed service provider that does not host your images can pull them and get them into your feeds or c an not include thumbnail images.
Yahoo Stores should ONLY use YourStoreWizards unless they store all their images including thumbnail size images somewhere outside their Yahoo Store.
I am not aware of any other feed solution that provides image hosting services as part of their feed solution. The other two best feed solutions I know of are GoDataFeed and SingleFeed. I know that GoDataFeed does not choose to host images.
SingleFeed and Rob Snell did an excellent Webinar on Shopping Engine Success for Yahoo! Stores which includes this warning:
Making changes to sizes of images or any other image changes can cause loss of images in Yahoo stores. They advise that it is better to host images elsewhere and call them into your store.
Based on that information I believe that SingleFeed does not host images so only Yahoo Stores who have their images hosted outside their store should use SingleFeed. I am attempting to confirm this information and will update this post when I hear back from them.
There is a known problem with images from Yahoo Stores and Google Product Search. Yahoo stores continually change the URLs for where they store your images and that affects whether Google Product Search (and probably other sites) can find them or not.
When the path to an image changes in your Yahoo store between the last feed sent to Google, when the search occurs your images will be missing from the feed.
Since YourStoreWizards hosts multiple sizes of your images at static URLs this issue does not affect their feeds. This is the reason Yahoo Stores using YSW will get more traffic and sales from Google Product Search.
Conclusions:
- It would be best to host the images used in your Yahoo Store elsewhere to avoid future problems with images. A recent change caused images in some stores to be too large.
- If you want to continue to allow Yahoo Stores to host your images you need to use YourStoreWizards at least for the SAS and Google Product Search feeds. Some sites resize their own images so you could use SingleFeed or GoDataFeed for them but you would have to check that on a case by case basis – most likely not worth the hours involved.
- If you chose to host your images elsewhere so you have total control, I would recommend staying with GoDataFeed because there solution is far more powerful than YSWs (so far – YSWs is upgrading their service) and they are much easier to work with. I received 19 separate emails from Jim before I finally understood they were hosting images. I still had to go to Rob Snell to get definitive answers.
- I advised GoDataFeed that they should be notifying their clients that have Yahoo Stores about this issue. GoDataFeed needs to either host the images or make it clear that they do not and recommend alternative image hosting solutions to their Yahoo Store clients.
- I have detailed information from Rob Snell regarding image hosting that I can sort through if you want to consider hosting your images elsewhere.
The bottom line: You need to choose one of these options and only you as a Yahoo Store owner can decide what is best for you:
- Leave your images in the Yahoo store and use YourStore Wizards exclusively for your feeds.
- Leave your images in the Yahoo store and use a combination of YWS and GDF so that you can take advantage of optimizing whatever feeds do not have to rely on images hosted at YSW.
- Pay extra to host your images at YSW while using other feed solutions. The last email I got from Jim at YSWs said, “We can provide hosting for images to be used on their Yahoo store but will need to charge for the bandwidth. The hosted images each have unique URLS which remain static. These could be called in using HTML.”
- Host your images elsewhere for maximum control and freedom to use any feed solution you choose. I sincerely believe GoDataFeed has the strongest benefits for you but only if you control where your images are (or they decide to add image hosting).
If you currently leave your images in your Yahoo Store and use GoDataFeed, SingleFeed or any other feed solution that does not host your images the way YourStoreWizards does you need to expedite moving your feed to YSWs.
That should increase traffic and sales from Google Product Search because it will eliminate the missing images issue.
GDF currently does not believe their not hosting images affects very many Yahoo Stores and YSW has built an entire business model around the fact that it does.
What I have explained here is critical to the success of Yahoo Stores. If you do not understand it or need specific questions answered use the comment section in this post or contact me directly.
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I am so far behind, that I didn’t even know yahoo still had stores. OOPS. I don’t even think about yahoo anymore.
Twitter: karomasti
December 28, 2010 at 2:15 am
Twitter: @karomasti
I like google product stores than yahoo stores for it features and its flexibility
Thanks for providing information about the yahoo stores. I am getting knowledge at foundation level. This is the first article that I have read about yahoo stores.
Twitter: robsnell
December 4, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Twitter: @robsnell
Thanks for the feedback on the book. BTW I’ve posted several presentations on changes in Google on robsnell.com. Vegas.
Way back in 1996, I started looking at Viaweb stores which in turn became Yahoo! Stores. They’ve been doing images this way since before there WERE datafeeds to shopping engines.
My store loads 2-3x as fast as my competitors because of Yahoo’s image servers. Because of this I generate AT LEAST tens of thousands of dollars a year, maybe more than that. It’s hard to tell without slowing your store down…
The secret is to PUBLISH often. If you don’t, your store is STALE, and not just to datafeeds. Google LOVES fresh content.
Most of the hundreds of stores I’ve worked on PUBLISH on a pretty regular basis. We publish our stores at LEAST once a day. If you are always adding content to your stores, updating inventory, changing prices, featuring items, adding reviews, then your feeds will be fresh because you publish often enough…
If you don’t publish very often, say once every few months, then you have more problems than images not showing up in old datafeeds. You should be adding content at least weekly.
Yahoo! Stores aren’t perfect, but there are positives and negatives to any e-commerce solution. I don’t think Yahoo! is doing anything criminal by not explaining how their image serving works, and what the upsides and downsides are, but thanks to sites like this there are plenty of resources for all of us!
Twitter: GrowMap
December 31, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Rob,
Sorry for the delay. I’ve been working reduced hours due to being under the weather and didn’t see this comment until just now.
Thank you so much for all these tips you’ve shared. In fact, they would make an excellent guest post. Would you like me to publish it here? If yes, let me know what your preferred anchor text and links are and I will schedule it for early 2011.
growmap would love you to read ..Reputation Management- How to Protect Your Brands
Twitter: robsnell
December 31, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Twitter: @robsnell
Sure! That would be great!
How about a link to my Yahoo! Store — Gun Dog Supply with the anchor text http://www.gundogsupply.com/collars.html with the anchor “dog collars”
Twitter: GrowMap
December 31, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Sure. Everyone knows I love links. You can have more one – in fact I would love you to provide anchor text links and landing pages to wherever those interested can find your content.
While I’m asking, if you ever have any interest in being featured in blog posts (interview questions) or doing guest posts I manage content across about a dozen blogs including 6-7 Internet Marketing / Social Media blogs. I’d love to publish whatever you want to share and in most of them I can include your Gun Dog Supply link as well as any Yahoo Store or book related links you wish.
A best-of compilation of your existing content would be great and I’m open to whatever else you most want to have covered. While I know you are very well known in some Yahoo Store circles I have no doubt that many others could really benefit from knowing about you.
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
I COMPLETELY understand this article. I just ran into this issue myself, and am very upset with Yahoo misleading people into building websites that only work off of their platform. Now that I know what I am doing, and inquired about my image links, they stated “Your image links are not static so they change daily depending upon which server you are using.” When I complained that they should have told me this before, they stated “Well, it shouldnt be that big of an issue because we do not receive many complaints over it” That is a flat out lie. When I manually submit to Google the exact data feed I am downloading from Yahoo and it is rejected I know that it is not working. Most people do not check to make sure their “automatic feed’ is actually doing what it should. People would be shocked to learn that it does not work yahoo to google, and vice versa. I do know, now, how to get around this problem and make my yahoo image links STATIC but I do not want to go through all the excess work if there is a program I can just use instead(which falls right into Yahoo’s plan of costing people extra money for the internet) I am really FED UP.
Twitter: GrowMap
December 2, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hello,
I feel your frustration. The reason this post exists is because of dozens or maybe even 100+ hours it took me to find out why images in feeds weren’t working. Both Yahoo and YourStoreWizards could have done a much better job of revealing how this issue affects Yahoo Store owners.
There is supposed to be an upside to the moving images issue (faster load times) but store owners need to know why their feeds don’t work on Google and product comparison sites and why wise affiliates avoid promoting Yahoo stores.
While you’re here you may be interested in the post I’ll put in CommentLuv in this reply. The most knowledgeable conversion experts are offering Webinars on how to increase sales.
growmap would love you to read ..THE Most Effective Way to Increase Sales or Leads
This issue certainly causes frustration for some of our customers, BadassToyMaster. Employing a Yahoo! Store developer to manage their shopping comparison engine feeds is a route many merchants choose, as growmap suggested above. Images uploaded to the Store Editor are hosted on a network that determines which of our servers can provide each image as quickly as possible, ensuring excellent loadtimes for your customers worldwide. The nature of this network causes URLs of uploaded images to be dynamic, which is what causes product image URL feeds to become outdated if not refreshed periodically.
Besides employing a Store developer as described above, there is another method that we can suggest. We make your store’s ‘catalog.xml’ available to comparison engines such as Google Base automatically if the feed is enabled under Search Engines. This feed is updated each time you publish the Editor and contains the accurate image URL at the time of publish. What we generally recommend is to ensure your catalog’s contents conform with the submission requirements of the third party engines you are concerned with and republish your editor relatively frequently. This will ensure that engines will have the freshest image URLs to index at all times.
If you choose to hire a third party company for feed management instead, we maintain a list of developers who may be able to offer such a service. You can see this list and contact them directly by visiting:
http://developernetwork.stores.yahoo.net/
Twitter: GrowMap
December 3, 2010 at 11:49 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Thank you for replying to ToyMaster’s concerns and suggesting additional alternatives; however, since the images are dynamic no matter how frequently you update your feed some of the urls will be incorrect. As you said, “contains the accurate image URL at the time of publish.”
Many sites that accept feeds also have limits on how often you can update them. It is clear to me that Yahoo Store owners need to have their images in a static location for their feeds for maximum success with Google Base and to get top affiliates to promote their products.
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
YSmallBizCare- I, too, would like to thank for the response. At least Yahoo must be making an attempt to track these issues. However, I can’t believe Yahoo honestly feels these answers should be acceptable. I have paid for web hosting and web site building. If the site building tools you have provided are not adequate then they should be changed. I should not have to utilize a “third party” to convert data that I painstakingly constructed as directed only to find out that I should have done it another way. I have pointed these issues out to tech support repeatedly now that I know what they are. I could and would fix them if I were the service provider, the fact that Yahoo will not tells me that it IS INTENTIONAL. In another related point, I was never informed that I would have to “pay” to be included in Yahoo’s directory. One would obviously assume that if I am using Yahoo’s services, then I would be included. I am extremely disappointed that I must pay $299 to be unblocked from appearing in Yahoo’s directory. I am using Yahoo as a service, and do not appear listed in the directory, but Google HAS 66 INDEXED PAGES for my site. It seems to me, Yahoo is good at taking money and setting people up so that they spend MORE and MORE money to get the results they know the customer was intending in the beginning. Simply ridiculous.
AND TO GROWMAP, thanks for another great reply! Once again you nailed the issues.
Twitter: GrowMap
December 31, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hello,
I hope you read the comment above yours from Rob Snell. Yes, this IS intentional to make your store load faster and as Rob has explained that increases sales – and that will become more important as search engines have added page load time to their algorithm which means slow pages = poor search engine listings.
As Rob mentioned, product feeds didn’t exist when Yahoo Stores were created. On top of that, large companies like Yahoo expect their users to do things their way. They are rarely very interested in what we wish they would do.
The bottom line is that everything is so complicated and you never know what you’re getting into until you do it. Most people who pay Yahoo to host a store would expect that Yahoo would list their store. Logically that would make more sense because they make a percentage of what you sell over the years versus an annual fee. That may be their way to discouraging small stores from competing.
If you ever decide to look into another type of store check out Volusion ecommerce store solutions or consider using this WordPress ecommerce plugins or this other WordPress ecommerce plugin.
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
Twitter: NexusMagicStore
October 9, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Twitter: @NexusMagicStore
I first want to start off by thanking you for this article. I noticed thumbnails disappearing from my product feeds sometime ago. I was confused by why and had no idea how to fix this issue or remove my feeds altogether. This is quite enlightening. Thank you,
I also want to give Rob Snell my sincerest appreciation for the work he put into his book. I have spent the last 18 months building my site the hard way not knowing a thing about anything. My work was fed by desperation as the economy killed my field of work. So I tackled my passion the Magic industry. I opened Nexus Magic Store in 2009.
Rob I found your book “Starting a Yahoo Store for Dummies” I bought it and realized the book title should have been: “You should have bought this 18 months ago Dummy”
I keep it with me everywhere I go and consult it often. It’s the Yahoo Store Bible, and I have been saved.
Owning an Online Magic Store has been a huge challenge being that the mystery of Magic has been around since the dawn of time. A search query on magic spans centuries, and while my rank seems to be improving it has been a very slow process. I am one guy competing with large magic retailers. I am constantly trying to find the right keywords, and content to compete with the world of magic. It has been a tough challenge. I am still starving, but I am looking towards the other side of the Rainbow.
Any advice or help would be amazing…
Twitter: GrowMap
October 10, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Jason,
I am glad you found Rob’s book. I will Tweet this comment at him. Love your revised title.
There is much information on this blog that will help you grow traffic to your business and improve conversions. Conversions come first – then traffic.
The very best way you can compete with larger businesses is by interacting online. I see you are on Yelp and that has to be the cutest Twitter icon I have EVER seen! I just Tweeted it so more people will know about your store.
Even without a blog you can use CommentLuv to meet bloggers, but having a blog would be even bettter. Either way check out these two posts on the CommentLuv site:
How CommentLuv Works (even if you don’t have a blog to install it in
How to use CommentLuv default links to get anchor text backlinks for your blog or business.
growmap would love you to read ..How CommentLuv Grows Businesses and Blogs
Twitter: BlissLivingUSA
September 30, 2010 at 5:15 am
Twitter: @BlissLivingUSA
Interesting information. Can across this while looking up a few Y! store errors. Thanks for the info.
This concern is a extremely significant a single for every Yahoo Store proprietor since it seriously impacts their ability to derive sales from any other website that uses feeds such as Google Item research and makes valuable energy affiliates avoid operating with them.
I have a friend who is very grateful that I passed this information along to. Knowledge is the key to success! Thanks for the info!
Twitter: GrowMap
October 10, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Ashley,
I am glad your friend was helped. We have several wedding related posts and an engraved gifts blog that has more of them. Both blogs are dofollow with CommentLuv and KeywordLuv installed.
growmap would love you to read ..How to Build a Successful Blog Based Business
Twitter: nilocabasag
June 21, 2010 at 12:09 am
Twitter: @nilocabasag
I think yahoo store owner has finally find solution to their problem. YourStoreWizard plays an important role in creating this solution.
Twitter: patgrahamblock
June 15, 2010 at 5:52 am
Twitter: @patgrahamblock
I have a baby gifts store hosted on the yahoo platform and my pics weren’t showing up either, so I now use a service that takes care of my feed for only $30.00 per month and I have over 1000 products. My feed is re-uploaded every day and I love it! If you want the information, feel free to contact me at my store.
Twitter: GrowMap
October 10, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Pat,
I am glad you found a solution that works for you. You are welcome to share a link to that company in reply to this comment if you like.
Some places you send feeds do not accept daily uploads – they have a limit on how many you can do per month. ShareASale is one that has a maximum feed upload limit.
If you would like to collaborate with bloggers who have sites related to your store, join us in our private blog collaboration. I know of at least two blogs who could send you traffic and sales if you wanted to work with them.
growmap would love you to read ..Join Bloggers Supporting Bloggers NOW
I don’t know anything about Yahoo Stores but will share this with stores that use it.
Twitter: GrowMap
October 10, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Thank you Alicia. Few know about this issue – not even the other companies that offer product feed solutions.
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
Thank you for your kind words. We work hard at it and I’m very pleased you find our service is a good value. In addition to the important image hosting service, Your Store Wizards now has a brand new Feed Wizards dashboard. The dashboard allows our feed customers easy access to optimize their Yahoo store data feeds, as well as the ability to import and track traffic and sales using Yahoo! Web Analytics info. The Feed Wizards system always had a ton of optimization capabilities and we’ve brought these to a web format so our customers can have much more direct control over their feeds. If you are interested in trying out our new dashboard or our new auto categorization system just let us know.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 10, 2010 at 9:48 am
Twitter: @GrowMap
As you can see by this post I do my best to thoroughly research challenges, understand the issues and then share what I have learned for the benefit of others.
Thank you for your assistance in determining why traffic dropped at Google Product Search when we were not using Your Store Wizards and why images kept disappearing from our affiliate’s Web sites. These are both very serious issues for Yahoo Store owners.
I look forward to trying your new Feed Wizards system and am happy to provide whatever feedback I can. I am a “big picture” person who focuses on understanding how everything interacts and not an expert on store product feeds so I will encourage any who specialize in that area that I come across to work with you.
Rob Snell is the only person who comes immediately to mind but Michael Vorel may also have skills in that area. I recommend them both to Yahoo! Store owners who understand the importance of improving their stores’ usability and conversion rates.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..The Truth About Buying UPC Codes =-.
Twitter: DennisEdell
June 3, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Twitter: @DennisEdell
Excellent info for those that do use yahoo stores, and I’ll tweet it just in case.
I’ve however always steered people clear of them from the get-go. Perhaps they’ve smartened up in recent times, and I hope so.
Right from the jump they had a horrid reputation for both functionality and customer service after the fact…..h o r r i d, oh man I tell ya what.
To be fair, “the jump” was nearly a decade ago, but I have kept half an eye on it and the surrounding news, and haven’t heard fantastic things. I hope they’ve cleaned up.
.-= Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s featured blog ..The Future of DEDC – Part 3 – A Slight Modification You Might Like Better =-.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 4, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Thanks for reminding me that should anyone interested in building an ecommerce store be reading this I recommend they choose VOLUSION as their platform.
There are pros and cons to using Yahoo Stores but at least their shopping carts work consistently. That is why I intentionally had so many Yahoo Store ppc clients.
Many of the commonly used shopping carts have usability issues that are costing their users tons of sales – and they’ll never even know because the issues are intermittent and each issue (and there are usually MANY different issues) only affects a small percentage of lost sales.
Few buyers bother to figure out why they can’t check out or notify the store owner. THAT is one of the single most common reasons conversion rates in online stores are so low.
TIP for new ecommerce stores: NEVER, never, never allow a programmer to talk you into letting them write a new shopping cart program. That is just not wise AT ALL. Use one that already works and has been thoroughly debugged. As I said, I recommend Volusion.
My research indicated that ProStores excellent but I never had a client who actually used them. I did have clients using Volusion and having great success and I highly recommend their <free chat solution available to any site owner regardless of what platform the use.
There are now ways to turn WordPress blogs into ecommerce sites but I have not used any that provide shopping cart functionality. We do use one to add affiliate products to our Golf store and blog.
.-= Gail @ Ecommerce Stores´s featured blog ..How CommentLuv Grows Businesses and Blogs =-.
Frustrating computers
Thanks for the good info – I haven’t looked into Yahoo Stores I’m guessing they don’t have a vehicle section. I used to use Google base but never had much activity from it. Now they don’t have a vehicle section with the new Google Product Search last I looked (they still have the vehicle section of Google Base active though which I still have a feed with, but again never had much luck with it)
.-= Chris@Classic Cars for Sale´s featured blog ..1968 Shelby Mustang GT 500 Eleanor for Sale =-.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 4, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Chris,
You’re thinking of the shopping sections that use feeds from stores. This post is more for ecommerce stores using the Yahoo! Store platform that want to send their feeds to other sites.
I would recommend you make getting your Local Directory listings a priority and then use CommentLuv to bring together the community that is most interested in Classic Cars. There are bound to be blogs and niche communities.
Those in each niche need to identify (or create) the best community, get very active there, and promote that community from their blogs. Make sure that those who are looking for what you have to offer are all “hanging out” in the same places and that you’re there interacting with them.
.-= Gail @ Support Small Businesses´s featured blog ..Local Search Directory Listings =-.
Mighty fine advice – I haven’t seen a good community of classic car bloggers using commentluv as of yet (or classic car blogs in general). I’ve been playing around with the idea of creating my own, but time is always a factor. And the local directory submission is on the to do list as well… I enjoyed your post about UBL I’ll certainly implement that as soon as I get a few other things organized. Spring is a busy time for classic cars
.-= Chris@Classic Cars for Sale´s featured blog ..1956 Porsche Speedster Replica for Sale =-.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 10, 2010 at 9:38 am
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Chris,
I know someone who may be in the market to buy more classic cars soon so do keep in touch. It is up to each of us to lead the niche community that we need to have. Someone has to blaze a trail, share best practices and recommend CommentLuv.
Feel free to use the information in the post I featured in CommentLuv in this reply and the posts I’m now writing as Editor-in-Chief at CommentLuv that make it easier to understand.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..How CommentLuv Grows Businesses and Blogs =-.
Thank you Gail for the referral that would be wonderful! I’m still brainstorming ideas for a classic/exotic car blog, I occasionally (and other colleagues I work with more so) deal with exotic cars as well so my dilemma is whether to create one all encompassing blog or two separate blogs since the demographics for a ’69 VW bus is quite different from a limited production Ferrari.
.-= Chris@Classic Cars for Sale´s featured blog ..1968 Jaguar XKE 2+2 Coupe for Sale =-.
At work we liked very YourStoreWizards, after 3 months our revenues increased with 25% that’s amazing, and it wasn’t generated by the season factor.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 3, 2010 at 10:47 am
Twitter: @GrowMap
Thank you for sharing Nadine,
Ecommerce stores need to be very proactive at finding new ways to generate traffic and sales. Those that do not host their images outside their Yahoo store really need to use Your Store Wizards.
You may wish to read the post about UPC codes because many feeds are already requiring them and many Yahoo Store owners don’t have them in their stores yet. Amazon is already serious about them and eventually they could become mandatory on Google Product Search and other sites as well.
.-= Gail @ Support Small Businesses´s featured blog ..The Truth About Buying UPC Codes =-.
Twitter: robsnell
June 2, 2010 at 9:30 am
Twitter: @robsnell
Well, one thing Yahoo! does with these images is that they are hosted on Akamai’s speedy servers ALL over the world which means your store loads up to 2x faster than the competition’s store which is better for conversion.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 2, 2010 at 9:43 am
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Rob,
It is good to know that there is a reason why they would do that; however, it appears that most Yahoo Store Owners have no idea that they are seriously impacting their ability to pull sales from sites like Google Product Search and making images disappear from affiliate sites.
When we switched from YourStoreWizards to GoDataFeed traffic from Google Product search dropped to roughly half what it had been. No other changes were made at that time so the images going missing was the cause. Traffic went back up when we switched back to the YSW feed.
When a Yahoo Store decides to use feeds they need to either use YSWs or host their images somewhere static. Everything is always more complicated than most people ever realize.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Word of Mouth Marketing =-.
Twitter: crkngconfidence
June 2, 2010 at 4:09 am
Twitter: @crkngconfidence
It’s the little details like this, sometimes they take up some time, that make all the difference to your business. The old 80-20 rule – 20% of the things you do will make 80% of the difference to your business, so spend more of your time there.
.-= dan@London Self-Esteem Workshop´s featured blog ..Goal Setting Tips from Our Children =-.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 2, 2010 at 7:48 pm
Twitter: @GrowMap
Thanks Dan,
What most don’t realize is there hundreds or even thousands of individual improvements that drive success. The problem with the 80-20 rule is the same as the old saying about half of advertising being a waste but not knowing which half.
If everyone knew which 20% was most important they could focus on that but most have no idea. THAT is the single most important reason that it isn’t how many hours you pay a consultant to work for you – it is what they can implement that has already been proven to work and is most certain to work for you.
Usually that takes many years or even decades of experience in particular specialties. It is unfortunate that so few business owners recognize the importance of particular recommendations. It isn’t the time it takes someone to tell you what to do or even to implement it for you – it is the years of knowledge and wisdom that led up to the recommendation and how to apply it specifically to your business.
.-= Gail @ Support Small Businesses´s featured blog ..Local Search Directory Listings =-.
Twitter: robsnell
June 2, 2010 at 3:30 am
Twitter: @robsnell
Thanks for a great post!
Twitter: GrowMap
June 2, 2010 at 9:32 am
Twitter: @GrowMap
Thank you Rob. That is high praise coming from you. Thank you for Tweeting this post so that other Yahoo Store owners will see it. They need to be pro-active at improving their stores. The best way to offset declining demand due to the economy and declining traffic due to the changes Google is making is to raise conversion rates.
If you know of anyone who knows both Yahoo Stores and conversion optimization who has time to take more clients please refer them to me. I would like to start posting regularly on the importance of improving conversions and can assist new optimizers in getting paid work.
Your Yahoo Store owners might also be interested in the research I did on UPC codes. There are links in the post to current requirements at Amazon and Google Product Search and information on where to buy UPC codes and where NOT to buy them.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Support Small Businesses =-.
Twitter: colleenlane
June 1, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Twitter: @colleenlane
Yikes! Given the length of the blog article today, and the time spent to explain the feed solution for Yahoo stores, one wonders if it’s worth the effort. I guess time will tell, eh.
.-= Colleen@Kennewick Real Estate´s featured blog ..Memorial Day Events Around the Mid Columbia =-.
Twitter: GrowMap
June 2, 2010 at 9:25 am
Twitter: @GrowMap
Hi Colleen,
The question would be worth the effort to whom? This issue is a very serious one for every Yahoo Store owner because it seriously impacts their ability to derive sales from any other site that uses feeds such as Google Product search and makes valuable power affiliates avoid working with them.
We lost a valuable affiliate because the images to my favorite online gift store kept going missing on his site because Yahoo moves the links to them. How ridiculous is that?
Affiliates need to know this too: make sure that the Yahoo Stores you work with use Your Store Wizards or you won’t be able to keep the images from feeds on your pages.
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Twitter: matthewacoleman
June 17, 2011 at 3:08 am
Twitter: @matthewacoleman
We used to be have a Yahoo Store but opted to host our own images now..there are a lot of issues in the Yahoo store that we did not like.great article..this will warn people and give them advice
wny glass block windows would love you to read ..Glass Block Window Showers
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