What do dog collars have to do with Yahoo Stores? That is one of many products that Rob Snell sells at his Gun Dog Supply Yahoo store. Why should you care? How about because his 14 Years of experience increased his family store’s income by $10,354,767 – and more importantly – he is really good at teaching HOW he did it!
When I needed answers about a Yahoo Store Product Feed issue, I immediately contacted Rob Snell because he is THE Yahoo Store expert.
Rob wrote the book on Yahoo Stores – literally – Yahoo Stores for Dummies – but that isn’t all. No one knows as much about Yahoo Stores as Rob because he has what I consider the ideal background for really knowing how to increase sales and optimize an ecommerce store:
Rob and his family own a highly successful store and handle every aspect of what that takes from Web development to usability to conversion optimization to marketing.
There is one key to how I do what I do: I figure out who knows the most about what I have questions on and I go directly to them for the answers I need. That is where Rob comes in and why you’re reading this post today. Just this week, Rob has shared what every ecommerce store owner (and blogger who sells affiliate products or uses an ecommerce plugin) needs to know.
He tells you EXACTLY HOW he increases sales in his store.
So many people are big on the “what” but don’t give you enough HOW to actually get it done. THAT makes Rob leader of the pack and leaders are the ones who can increase YOUR sales too!
Want to make more money? Get serious about these specific strategies:
- Increase your sales using Rob’s method for determining exactly what pages of your site generate the most revenue, how to prioritize which pages to focus on, and how to do ecommerce SEO.
- Monday Rob was on WebmasterRadio and shared these SEO Mistakes Retailers Make. Learn from Rob’s 14+ years of experience and be glad you’re not taking notes! Use the transcript to review and implement his tips.
- You NEED to know how to do ecommerce conversion optimizaton. Play and replay that presentation. Take notes. Then DO what Rob teaches you do.
As if that wasn’t enough, here are the tips Rob shared – in just one comment – in that post I mentioned about Yahoo feeds:
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!
When it comes to increasing sales in ecommerce stores, Rob is on my short list of who’s who. If you have a Yahoo Store he is THE person you need to learn from wherever he publishes and speaks. (Hey Rob, I need a link to your upcoming speaking engagements and where you’re publishing regularly these days!)
In the meantime, Follow RobSnell on Twitter and Friend Gun Dog Supply on Facebook to find out what he’ll be up to next. And share this post with all your favorite store owners too!
ECOMMERCE CONVERSION TIPS:
- NEW: Ecommerce Mistakes That Make You Look Like An Amateur
Gail Gardner
Hi Ayden,
I’ve been online a REALLY long time – since the www first became available – and I have been online probably 80-120+ hours a week since 2000. Rob is THE BEST I’ve ever seen with Yahoo! Stores and much of what he writes about applies to any ecommerce site and often ANY site.
growmap would love you to read ..Small Business Internet Marketing: Where to Start
My boss told me that we were using Yahoo store before and the sales was good but because of the increase cost of Yahoo store, we moved to Volusion which has limited features. How I wish we return back to Yahoo store.
Hi Raymund,
What features does Yahoo have that Volusion
doesn’t? Have you asked Volusion if they have them or would consider adding them. I have always found them very responsive to input from their store owners.
Many Yahoo stores were negatively impacted by Google’s MayDay update and Farmer Panda update more than other ecommerce sites, but no matter what ecommerce platform you use you must follow Rob’s advice and have plenty of quality UNIQUE content on every page if you expect them to stay indexed in the search engines and bring you buyers.
[Disclosure: that IS an affiliate link to Volusion because I DO strongly recommend them.]
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Wow i didn’t expect that yahoo stores earn so much money, i tought that amazona and ebay are biggest players down there.
Hello,
There are many ecommerce solutions that have many multi-million dollar small businesses on them. Amazon and eBay will have more sales than most any individual Yahoo or Volusion
store, but there are ecommerce solutions that could have higher total incomes.
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Hi
Yahoo store is being discussed a lot these days. I wonder why? You have an informative post here. it seems it is easy to make money with it.
Thanks for the info.
Have a great week end
Fran A
Fran Aslam would love you to read ..Web Portfolio for Freelance Writers
Hello Fran,
There is nothing that is really “easy to make money with” because all methods require consistent work to develop a viable business.
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
I have to be honest and say this is the first I have heard about
Yahoo stores, I didn’t know they existed.
Looks like I have some research to do and I guess I will start
with Rob’s Yahoo Stores for Dummies.
Thanks,
James
James Howard would love you to read ..Google Sniper 20 Review – My Own Results With The Google Sniper System
Hi James,
There have been Yahoo stores for a very long time. If you’re considering creating a store, you will want to first see if any of the WordPress ecommerce solutions will work and then consider other solutions especially Volusion
. (Yes that is an affiliate link because I DO highly recommend them.)
growmap would love you to read ..Small Business Social Media Internet Marketing Strategy
This is not surprising that both boost sales! After all, Yahoo 25% of world traffic! I wish them more prosperity =)
[Link removed because we do not advocate cheating. Future comments to that domain will be deleted.]
I do not believe that is accurate, but Yahoo is a PR9 site and does have substantial traffic as can be seen in their Compete and Alexa stats. Today, Alexa lists Yahoo as the number 3 site in the U.S. and 4th in the world.
growmap would love you to read ..Yahoo Stores Expert Rob Snell 10-354-767 Sales Increase
Hi Ivin,
Everything Yahoo! is connected. Back in the day there were fewer high quality store solutions and Yahoo! Stores were one of the best for a couple of reasons:
1) Their shopping cart works consistently (and others did not so NEVER let anyone talk you into creating a shopping cart from scratch unless you must have custom functionality others do not support AND you are POSITIVE they are brilliant).
2) They send stores traffic and buyers which is a huge advantage especially for a new store.
The trade-off is that they keep a percentage of your sales which – when they sent you free traffic – was well worth it to most merchants. Some store owners complain that now you have to pay to list your Yahoo store in Yahoo’s directories which seems counter-intuitive since they make commissions off everything you sell.
Marketing Experiments publishes some excellent Yahoo Stores Case Studies on where a store would make more money and I remember a study on whether having two stores (one on Yahoo and another elsewhere) makes sense that I thought they did but perhaps it was somewhere else.
growmap would love you to read ..Small Business- 6 Resources on the Web for SMBs
Additional Resources: Compare Yahoo Stores to other ecommerce solutions:
Marketing Experiments: The value of a Paying to List a Yahoo Store in Yahoo Shopping.
The Case for Yahoo Stores Over eBay Stores
Ebay or Yahoo Store?
Marketing Experiments ebay Stores tested
Small Business Internet Marketing Priorities and Where to Start
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Hi,
Would it be possible to submit my own e-commerce store feeds to Yahoo?
I’ve done it for Google and some other portals like frogit.
What about Yahoo? I found Bing portal very confusing.
I would appreciate your input.
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Hello Alexis,
I am not familiar with Yahoo having anything similar to Google Product Search or independent solutions I much prefer such as ShopWiki (now in at least ten countries), TheFind, and Wishpot, but I am not nearly as involved in ecommerce as I once was.
Rob may have additional information or you might try Tweeting to Yahoo Shopping on Twitter and ask them.
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Hi Gail,
Another suggestion with ecommerce stores is to know how to upsell.
Close to one third of my online sales comes from upsells at the point of purchase.
Where do most web marketers go wrong?
At the point of purchase, the sell the second for a lower price.
Actually, this is where you should introduce a more expensive item instead.
Regards,
Ivan
Hi Ivan,
Yes, upselling is key and so is cross-selling. Rob shares about those kinds of strategies too. Back when I managed AdWords accounts I did my best to get store owners to do that better. Offering the wrong products instead of highly related upsell products is a very common mistake.
If you have a sharp WordPress expert like my JV partner Derek you can automatically add cross-sell products at the end of new posts as you can see in our Gift Blog and turn on or add additional product suggestions in a WordPress store like the ones in our Gift Store.
Those are automated but in many ecommerce platforms which products appear can be manually selected and I HIGHLY recommend stores use that space to their best advantage by starting with their best converting pages and working down through all their product pages.
In our WordPress blogs our CSS expert Derek creates other upgrades such as adding code that automatically features the post we most want someone to see when they search our blog posts like this one for Business Card Holders.
He created a way for me to select which post I want to feature for key searches so instead of a bunch of individual short product posts we can guide our visitors into a primitive sales funnel.
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