Skill #3: Web Store Hosting-Where and How?
Did you know that Yahoo has 13 million people a day visit them looking for products in Yahoo Stores? Did you think those stores were owned by Yahoo? Those stores are owned by independent businesses, like Best-Mats! Yes, you can also be one of those independent business owners as well.
Yahoo offers three different plans for web store hosting. They are actually three pricing tiers. The lowest tier is fine for a new store with lower traffic patterns as you are beginning to get recognized on the web. Yahoo gets a 1.5% cut of your sales on the lowest pricing tier. At the mid-level tier, you pay a higher price. In exchange for higher monthly hosting fees, you get more bandwidth, more room for your files, and more tools to use at your store and Yahoo drops their cut down to 1%. At the highest tier you get more bandwidth, tools and a lower cut from Yahoo! So, why should you consider having Yahoo host your online store…did I mention 13 million reasons earlier?
Yahoo is the world’s largest internet store hosting concern. They get the traffic! Not only that, they are committed to your success. Why? Because they get a cut! Think about it. Did you look at that “cut” I mention and have thoughts of a robber entering your store? No, No, No! You want them to have a vested interest in your success. That pushes Yahoo to make their tools simple, their software reliable and their customer service second to none!
A perfect example happened to me the week I was writing this report. Several of my items on my website (Hosted by Yahoo! ®) are offered with quantity discounts. You know, if you order a single piece the price is $20, 2-9 the price is $18.00-etc. Well, the software at Yahoo allows this quite easily.
...However, because of the way the Yahoo store tags work, the pricing looks like gibberish to my customers. There was an easy solution, I simply hard-coded the pricing into my webpage and everything looked fine. Except, I got to thinking…I have had price increases from my supplier twice in the last year, due to the rising cost of oil products. (All our mats have rubber or PVC vinyl backings and many contain synthetic fibers derived from oil.) Well, the way the Yahoo store tag system works, you grab the store tag from your catalog and place it in your HTML code on your webpage. If you go to your catalog and update your price, then the new price immediately comes up the next time a customer clicks on that webpage. If I hard-code the price into the HTML, I loose that benefit, since I will need to go to every webpage and change the code.
So, I contacted Yahoo customer service and explained the problem. I asked if there were any way I could enter quantity pricing into my catalog, and have the store tag show only the single piece price. The response from Yahoo’s customer service was quick. They said No, there was no way that the software could do that currently. But, they passed along the problem to their software engineers who are currently working to make it happen! Imagine that. True customer service. I have the power of an entire software engineering group at my command! Well, almost at my command. There is a queue. But the point to this story is that Yahoo has the resources and the vested interest in their store owner’s profits to provide awesome customer service. Not only that, but they have the power of 13 million hungry customers visiting their stores daily. So, how do you get started with Yahoo?
I would suggest that you begin where I began, with Yahoo Store Profits. Andy Jenkins has created a step-by-step guide to setting up a Yahoo store complete with screen shots directly from the Yahoo system. He takes you by the hand and provides each minute step in detail. I used the guide to set up Best-Mats. The guide will save you a ton of time. The Yahoo store owners guides are great, but what Andy has done is so much more effective as he walks you through the process complete with screen shots to show you what he’s talking about.
There are cheaper places to host a web store (not much cheaper though). But when you consider that you need to get up and running once the clock is ticking on your hosting time clock, you can’t beat Yahoo’s customer service, knowledge and the traffic they can bring you!
To review Andy Jenkins Yahoo Store Profits click on this link.
Can you sell something if you have 13 Million Chances a day? Do you want those 13 Million Chances? Then you’re gonna need a Yahoo! Store. We'll show you how to profit with one, Step-By-Step.
So, you are becoming proficient with HTML, you have found the best products to offer at your new Yahoo! ® store, and you have a supplier for those items. Great-you’re ready to go, right? Not quite. After all, people won’t buy your products just because you put up a few webpages-unless those webpages tempt them, draw them, make them salivate for the products on the page…
To do that you need Home Business Online Opportunity Skill #4 .