It has been months since Yahoo! customer registration was announced on the Yahoo store blog and now, as of the 16th of August,  it is a live beta.  I, for one, am excited about this and the fact that it is a beta means that there is more in store for this awesome feature.  As of this write-up it supports some open ID platforms, such as Yahoo! Google and AOL. I am sure more are planned and I bet they will add a way to make your own ID.  Installation on a new store is easy as pie, so I will not cover that, but I am going to cover the HTML and RTML installations. Continue reading “Yahoo! Customer Registration” »

Social networking is big. If this is news to you, come out from the rock you live under and join the fun on the  ”interwebs”. I am going to show you how to add a Facebook Like button to your store with RTML code.  This button will have the item page URL built into it so everyone’s friends can see what they liked. The goal of this is to bring in new customers, and I hope that it helps your Yahoo! store. Continue reading “Facebook “Like” Button” »

Speed, we all love it and want more of it! Fast computers, faster internet connections and faster internet browsers are all well and good, but what can we do to make a faster web page? Every day, web sites and online stores are getting flashier.  CSS and JavaScript can do a lot of cool stuff, and images can help a site grab your attention.  Recently, Google has begun using page load times to adjust search rankings, so make that one more reason to speed things up a bit. What I am going to talk about today will Smush your images, compress your JavaScript and minif your CSS, even use Sprites to help bring that slow site up to speed!

Continue reading “minified, smushed, and compressed!” »

There has been some buzz as of late over ways to convert visitors who would otherwise leave the site for any number of reasons.  In  a recent article from Practical Ecommerce they talked about converting users that land on a 404 page.  Most of the time they will get a 404 page if you remove an item from the store and or site and the visitor clicks on an old, for example on a search results page.  The page they are attempting to view is not available and they will see a 404 error. Continue reading “custom 404 page” »

Over time, your store will take longer and longer to publish.  Some of the things that contribute to this are the number of items in your store, the number of templates you have and the amount of work your templates need to do to make the HTML for the page.  One way to speed up publishing is to remove unnecessary elements from the editor.  If you have custom templates you can do a little RTML coding and change how the site will publish. Continue reading “Speed up your publish” »

So I wanted to have my first post this week, in case you missed the post a few days ago my name is Brad Crombs, and I wanted to help Chris by blogging for E Comm Solution. I come from a back ground of basic web design and advanced CSS. I will be sharing my CSS tips and tricks in the Yahoo store, but this information can also be applied to the Web in general.  Today I will be going over in-cart CSS for the Yahoo! store and setting a custom background color, one thing you can’t change without downloading, and customizing the default stylesheet. Continue reading “Easy Custom Cart CSS” »

Just want to introduce Brad Crumbs to the Team at E-commsolution, he will be blogging about CSS code and is the foremost expert when it come to CSS 2 and 3, so look for him when it comes to easy CSS fix in the store

The Yahoo Store is a wonderful platform, easy to use as everything has its place: images, text, item info. With the basic setup it will please most customers and Yahoo does a great job with these things.  Some store owners want more, such as an image light box, custom navigation bar or more images, for a few examples.  This last one is what I will show you today, we will be adding more images! Right now the store has 2 images per item, the main image and an inset image. The inset image is placed in the product description area and text will wrap around the image. What I will show you today is how to add 4 images total and move them to just under the main image. With that you can also use the post on Light box to add even more flair to your store. Image on left is of Woven Art & beyond

Continue reading “Adding more images to the Yahoo! Store” »

Today I am going to talk about Trust marks, Yes the “make your customer feel good” marks. Every online store uses trust marks, Best Buy, New Egg, Dicks sporting goods and many more. those are big name company’s and yet they still need to tell their customer that you can trust our cart. So what can you do? you can go to mcafee.com and buy their badge and that will be around $800 a year, I am not saying to not look into the Badge or VeriSign will run over $500 a year and most be name companies use both of them and it’s a good way to go if you have the funds but most of us don’t have the money to spend on that kind of trust a few options I would like to share with you are free and just take some time. Continue reading “shopping cart abandonment part 2, Trust Marks” »

Many items that fall under many sections, Brands, categories and maybe price but all show the same Path or Bread Crumbs, in the Yahoo! Merchant solutions it will only show the Parent section that holds that item. There are a few options to showing the bread crumb trail and the one that I will be sharing today will be multi-breadcrumb.
With Multi-breadcrumb it will show all paths to that item and all will link back to the section that it came from, now this is not “live breadcrumbs” as that will take JavaScript to make it work and I don’t like to share JavaScript code because that will sometimes get hard but this is the same RTML that is used in Live breadcrumbs and can work for you if you know how to code it. I will be showing you how to modify the current breadcrumbs template to make this work.

Continue reading “Store Multi-Breadcrumbs” »