posted on October 3, 2003 03:43:34 PM new
Greetings,
I have had a Yahoo store for nearly a year.
I have seen the other threads but I think mine will give you an actual user scenario of the changes.
Please note that I am NOT participating in Yahoo shopping due to the nature of some of my items.
These are the real and actual details of my store using July 2003 as an example
$2,850 in sales
$49.95 store fee
$29.00 store item fee
$23.27 NETWORK revenue fee
$14.27 TRANSACTION REVSHARE
$116.49 total
WEBHOSTING OUTSIDE THE YAHOO NETWORK $10 a month
$29.00 Store item fee means each listing I have in my store 290 items and even though almost all of them have flavor/scent choices my massage lotion in 10 flavors counts as 1 item, not 10 items.
$23.27 NETWORK revenue fee this is 3.5% of sales Yahoo CLAIMS came from their network. I argue with them monthly on it as I am not listed in Yahoo shopping. Basically if some user visited some other Yahoo property recently then comes to my store even though they didn't find my store on Yahoo shopping they still have that Yahoo cookie on their computer and I get to pay 3.5% SUCKS!
$14.27 TRANSACTION REVSHARE this is the 1/2% cut paid to yahoo for all other sales regardless of where they came from.
The Yahoo store host 1 picture for each item on their system. But no image/file storage for other purposes.
UNDER THE NEW SYSTEM
The merchant packages all include webhosting to use as you please and Email account with your domain. It is now an all in 1 package and if I make the switch I'll no longer need a seperate hosting account for my emails and personal files. PERSONAL SAVINGS OF $10 A MONTH.
Going back to July 2003 and $2,850 in sales
$39.95 Package fee
$42.75 revenue share at a flat 1.5%
$82.70 Total
Package includes domain hosting
35 matching Yahoo! Business Mail accounts (like [email protected])
Web Hosting featuring 350 MB of disk space and 35 GB/month of data transfer (a $39.95/month value)
I do not yet understand the cost per click. But I don't think it would apply to me since I won't be participating in the shopping directory.
I will call them today and find out.
In July 2003 I had 18,591 page views (each item is its own page)
{edit} .20 pay per click per person according to the phone call
posted on October 3, 2003 04:10:42 PM new
I just got off the phone with them and asked about this pay per click.
Basically for those that participate in Yahoo shopping the clicks are counted per unique vistor that finds your store through the yahoo network. So If my massage lotion were to be in Yahoo shopping the person who clicks on it costs me $.20 ONE TIME!
IN A NUTSHELL Yahoo is making an internal google ad words type system. All about and only for Yahoo store owners/merchants.
The difference would be that in goggle ad words you buy cost per click campaigns on your most popular items (I personally have 4 in google ad words) On Yahoo all of your items are potentially clickable at 20 cents PER PERSON.
So it is not that bad to pay 20 cents to get a potential customer.
Yahoo shopping is a great system to be in overall. It is all plug and play so I never need to create web pages. If I need to add a new item I simply fill in the blanks and upload a pic. If I discontinue an item I simply click to view it in my editor and click delete and its gone without affecting the entire page.
posted on October 3, 2003 05:21:38 PM new
i have a shop as well,i dont have the monthly statistic on hand,but i have over 1000 items in my shop and most have more than one picture.
when you list a new item,there is a place where you can upload more pictures,i think it is called inset.
inset is good when you want to show more details or different angle.
yahoo revenue share of 3 1/2 % applies when your order comes thru yahoo network,which includes yahoo finance,yahoo what not and yahoo shopping,so once they land on yahoo land and roam around they are cookied and if they come to your site and buy from you,you have to pay yahoo 3 1/2%.
so far yahoo is saying if you go with their new plan and do not want to pay per click,there is no guarantee whether they will spider your site,this is a big IF,as they will spide non yahoo sites,so they may or may not run into your site.
i dont know what category your site belongs to,but if you opt for the new price plan,you get 20% discount for cost per click.say mine is 19 cents,so after 20% discount is 15 cents.
my gripe is this-so far google gives me more business than yahoo and i do not pay google a dime.
i am on AOL and i dont need extra storage or badnwidth or 30 business emails from yahoo,so no savings there.
this is the gripe among many yahoo small shops,i look at my daily click trails and i know some are from yahoo network,but conversion rate is very low(convert clciking to order),so i could be paying yahoo for nothing.
personally i think yahoo suffers from PENIS ENVY,they hear the ebay/paypal cash register rining day and nite ,like a casino machine,people are always inserting quarter and dollar bills into it.and they are missing the boat,so they come up with this stupid scheme of pitching one shop against another.
just venting,this is the third price plan they have come up with since i sign up.
dont mean to offend anyone,unless you are yahoo management.
thanks for reading
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 3, 2003 05:30:43 PM new
one more statement and i will shutup-each time someone from yahoo shopping clicks on any of our item,it is 15 cents for me or 20 cents for you.
this sound cheap,if some of them buy.
but if 50 comes every nite and dont buy,it is 7.50 a day.
we get fraud orders from nigerian and indinesian and ghanan every nite and we just trash their orders,but just think we have to pay for their clicks if they come from yahoo shopping.
posted on October 3, 2003 05:47:47 PM new
Thanks for the info. One real big question -if I open and store and DO NOT participate in Yahoo Shopping, and someone happens to find my store, am I paying the per-click price? In other words do you get stung everytime someone finds you?
I would assume not, otherwise what's the point of having a choice to be included in searches or not.
posted on October 3, 2003 05:54:16 PM new
emak,
you do not pay yahoo cost per click if you do not participate.
also there is a possibility your item may show up on yahoo list when someone do a seach.
yahoo spiders non yahoo sites and yahoo sites which participates,so there is a possibility it may spider your site ??they dont know how it will work out.
but i do not want to wake up in the morning and find indonesians and nigerians clicking away on my items and i have to pay.
posted on October 4, 2003 06:15:35 AM new
NO,i do not sell electronics in my yahoo shop.
but i get them anyway.
the electronic stores are hit hard with fraudulent cc orders,some even go under after eating too many chargebacks.
they target yahoo shops as they know individual shops have their own shopping carts and they can try one shop at a time.
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 4, 2003 11:46:20 AM new
When I saw the new price structure I thought, WOW.. I may need to join Yahoo shopping now since there isn't a per item fee for your store. But then I saw the pay-per-click Yahoo Shopping part, and decided I may have to wait.. again.
posted on October 4, 2003 01:08:30 PM new
you can have a store and choose not to participate in cost per click.
if you have your own means of driving traffice to the store.
then if the order is completed,you pay yahoo 1 1/2% of the total order.
unless yahoo can convince us that the click to order conversion is better than in the past,it is hard to sleep well at nite.
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 4, 2003 01:29:31 PM new
When I talked to them on the phone they also said that you can CHOOSE which items are submitted to Yahoo shopping
MEANING your store can have 500 items
You can submit ONLY 100 TO YAHOO SHOPPING DIRECTORY
So if you want you can have only your best selling items in the directory at the cost per click then when a customer finds one of those items they come to your store and see the rest.
posted on October 4, 2003 01:39:55 PM new
when i review the daily click trails,half of them just click on one item.
but if we can just submit some of the store items to yahoo shopping,that would be easier on the budget.thanks lovepotions.
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 4, 2003 01:43:58 PM new
one question,what is the ranking order with this new plan?
now that old ratings will roll off in 6 months and anyone can rate us without buying anything from us??
and i just dont see this new plan is going to help us sell more,do you??
it may give yahoo more revenue until we decide we cant afford it anymore and go somewhere else or just simply go bellup.
2000 accounts were cancelled in august and 300 asked to be reinstated,what does it tell you?
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 5, 2003 06:37:41 AM new
Well, Yahoo Shopping was one of the main reasons I considered Yahoo Stores in the first place. But the pay per click scares me away. I've had some orders with Google Adwords, but have spent more than I have brought in.
Seth
posted on October 5, 2003 07:09:09 AM new
they call this a small merchant solution.
i just dont see how this can be our solution ??
also how many small merchants need 30 email addresses??
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 5, 2003 08:10:00 AM new
TFS- Again, you can use the the store and NOT fo the pay-per-click thing. Just consider it a website with advanced ecommerce features. You can choose to NOT have ties to Yahoo shopping if you prefer.
I'm definitely not going to sign up for their product search thing- At least not immediately. But I am still considering dropping my webhost and going with Yahoo store.
I don't much care for the feedback system either. Why is it even neccesary? I get by fine with no feedback on my own website.
-------------------
Replay Media
Games of all kinds!
posted on October 5, 2003 08:36:15 AM new
the old feedback system is used to rank the store in yahoo listing,say if someone comes to yahoo and does a search by keywords,yours would come up after featured shops and before other shops with lesser ratings.
but now the new rating will allow anyone to rate your store whether they buy or not??and ratings after 6 months will expire.
but i tend to agree,the new plan of 39.95 for 50,000 items is attractive,if you dont want to opt into yahoo shopping and pay per click,you get a nice e commerce site and drive your own traffic.
but yahoo shopping is the premier cyber shopping site and around xmas,it does get very busy.
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 5, 2003 09:57:42 AM new
I realize that joining Yahoo Shopping is not a requirement. It is, though, the main reason why Yahoo Stores (or Merchant Solutions) always held an interesting appeal to me.
Some things that always kept me away was the per item insertion fee's, lack of domain name and branded e-mail. Now that it's available I was considering the idea of moving my store.
Currently, I pay $15 a month (it's a reseller account, and I host and maintain a couple websites that pay for that so basically it's free) for hosting and use OSCommerce as my storefront software. The hard part is getting traffic to my store. I still continue to use Ebay as a way to drive traffic and am just now starting to show up in searches, so I am hoping the sales will increase. Yahoo Shopping would have been a way to increase my exposure but the pay per click model is not that appealing to me...yet.
Now, maybe I should give it a try and see what happens. I use 2Checkout for my CC processing but the fee's are high. Yahoo offers a CC proceesing with the stores that has a much better transaction fee.
Seth
posted on October 5, 2003 10:15:56 AM new
yahoo does not offer any credit card service,but there are several merchant account providers which tout their service on yahoo forum.-paymentech,worldnet and yahoo collectives.
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 5, 2003 11:18:08 AM new
paymentech is banc one and offers poor customer service and slow deposit of your charges.
the others are better.
but then if you sell electronics and charges keep rolling in,none of these providers are going to like it.
posted on October 7, 2003 08:23:55 AM new
Someone Said: "you can have a store and choose not to participate in cost per click.
if you have your own means of driving traffic to the store.
then if the order is completed, you pay yahoo 1 1/2% of the total order."
MY QUESTION IS, WHY pay Yahoo for a site, if you can pull in your own traffic? Why not establish an independent web site, and stop paying Yahoo for basically nothing but a site and a cart? FATCOW offers a site, photo hosting, ease of establishing with a cart, no revenue cut from income, and all that for only $99 a YEAR............. I have 2 sites with them, and have for 2 years, and LOVE their service. That is http://www.fatcow.com
I considered adding Yahoo to our list of web sites, but their cut is too much, and they offer too little to anyone capable of establishing their own site.
THEN I remembered the mess Yahoo made of their auctions, and decided to stay clear of a mentality like that.
posted on October 7, 2003 08:42:07 AM new
if you like the yahoo store format,then you just have to give them the 39.99 a month,then the 1 1/2% cut when order is received .
also there is just a possibility they will spider your site.
also for 39.99 you get to list 50,000 items.
yahoo also have some nice backoffice features.
but you are right,the choice is yours.
they now offer 24 hours phone support.
-sig file -------The thrill is gone!!
posted on October 8, 2003 05:37:46 AM new
I am completely happy with my Yahoo store and I DO NOT participate in Yahoo Shopping.
The ease of use and the new merchant solutions means I no longer need a seperate hosting account for emails and other data storage.
All of the graphs and statistics I can pul up in every different combination make it especially beneficial.
As it pulls all data traffic and refering domains I KNOW what people search for on any given search engine so I can go buy specific targeted adds on these systems.
Sure other host providers have this feature and I have had hosting account all over cyberspace in the last 4 years but this one in my Yahoo store control panel is the most precise.
The Yahoo network captures EVERYTHING so you can check it out if need be. (although the click trails can seem spotty at times)
