Tech Support Blog» Tech Support Blog by Solid Cactus

Accepting orders from the US only? Now it can REALLY happen!

Joe Everett — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:00:28 +0000

There was a time when you could only select US only for accepted orders, but you were stuck having the US possessions in the list of states whether you wanted to do business with those areas or not. Most Yahoo! store merchants found a way around it with their shipping rules. But deep down, some how that seems kind of cruel. Cruel in that you’re going to list these possession, but actually have no valid shipping method to that place so they can’t check out at all.

Well, there’s good news. Yahoo! recently made an update to their foreign orders section of the store manager. Check it out!

This update gives you the ability to select US Only as normal, “US-Only select states” and “US-Only select states and Canada” with a list box that lists all 50 states and all of the possessions.

Creating A Photo Gallery the Easy Way!

Joe Everett — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:57:17 +0000

When it comes to creating a photo gallery you may need HTML, but if you know the Yahoo store well enough, you can find other ways to do it.

First, you need to have a photo gallery page. If you don’t ready have the page created, you’ll want to take minute to do that.

Next, you’ll create a page for each image you want in the gallery, the same way you create any other page. Use the item type, and populate only the Name and Image. (Caption can also be used to include a caption for the image.)

Then, link to that new page you’ve created from the photo gallery page.

Customizing the appearance can be done by overriding variables. For example you can make the images on the image page or you can make the images larger on the photo gallery page, and you can even change the number of columns to allow for the larger images.

Just by knowing some of the basic functionality of the store you’re able to take this theory and massage it into something that works for your store. Our friends at the Luzerne County SPCA use this exact tactic while populating their SPCA Photos page. However, Green Start Baby Art took it to another level with there gallery of Girls Wall Stickers by letting each image link to an item to buy.

Besides using a gallery like this to showing off your products or events, a gallery page can be used to show off your customers too. The folks at Fun Dog Fred cleverly use a gallery page to show off customers appropriately labelled Friends of Fred.

Online Nature Mall Feeds Tech Support!

Joe Everett — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:59:28 +0000

Here in Technical Support we talk to many clients every day. Not a lot of folks realize the full range of services that we support. However recently we received a care package from our generous friends at Online Nature Mall. In appreciation for the services we have supported for them, they have sent Technical Support a large portion of Ice Cream. And anyone who has ever visited Solid Cactus knows how much we love Ice Cream, and how much Technical Support likes to eat! For your viewing pleasure we have carefully documented this Ice cream extravaganza.

From left to right: Nathan, Warren, Joe, Isaac (Tech Support Manager)

Online Nature Mall provides a full range of Nature Educational materials, equipment and lawn decorative products. If you love the outdoors, you will definitely want to stop by Online Nature Mall and take a look at what they have to offer! Thank you again to Online Nature Mall for all of your generosity!

Does Yahoo! Accept International Stores?

Joe Everett — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:07:23 +0000

As most of us know, anyone anywhere in the world can have a Yahoo! Store. Yahoo does not limit having a Yahoo! Store to just the US, but can you accept international orders? At the moment Yahoo Merchant Solutions’ checkout systems are set up only to compute currency in U.S dollars and cents. The best way to address this situation if you are needing to process orders of another currency, is to set up your payment options for the credit cards you are going to accept, without configuring it under a merchant account. You will still recieve notifications of these orders however you will have to process the orders offline manually. Yahoo! Small Business is one of the leading providers of E-commerce stores, not just because they are Yahoo! but because they are one of the best. They are constantly improving the platform and services that come with having a Yahoo! Small business account. So even though this may be the case now with payment processing, this can always change in the future!

Summary

Yahoo Stores are currently only configured to accept U.S Currency.

Merchants will be billed for transaction fees in U.S. dollars.

For reference on this article please refer to Yahoo! Help.

What is the difference between “Publish” and “Publish Order Settings”?

Joe Everett — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:04:11 +0000

The day has finally come. After weeks of planning, decision making, and populating your content on your store, the time has arrived for you to publish your site live! As you already know you have many different features in your Yahoo! Store. One thing that can get a little confusing is your publishing options. There are two options commonly misunderstood. The publish option within your store editor, and the “Publish order settings” option from the control panel in your Store Manager. Is there a difference? And if so, what is it? The answer is yes! First lets look at Publishing from inside of your store editor. When you log into your store editor you will notice in your tool bar you will have a publish button as shown here:

By clicking the Publish button from here, you will be publishing your entire store. If you have added new content such as new pages, products, pictures or text this is the publishing option that you will want to go with. Now lets look at “Publish your order settings” and the options it provides. When you log into your Yahoo! Store control panel, you will see in your store manager a set of links that contain a “Publish order settings button as shown here:

This option provides you with the ability to publish your shopping cart settings only. This option makes alot of sense for several reasons. If you have a large store, with many products it can often take several hours for your entire store to publish. If you have only made changes to your Checkout settings this option is much more time efficient because your only re-publishing the settings that you have changed, instead of your entire site.

Summary

The main difference between the two publishing options is that publishing from your store editor publishes your entire store, whereas using the “Publish order settings” will only publish your shopping cart and checkout settings!

How do I restrict shipping to certain countries?

Joe Everett — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:38:21 +0000

Excellent question! You can set up the Shipping Form page in your account, so that it only provides the countries that you specify in the list of choices. On your Store Manager, click “Foreign Orders” within the Order Settings section. This will take you to the “Foreign Orders” page which looks like this:

The countries you choose on this page will display under the Country drop-down on the Shipping Information checkout page. There are several ways that your store will allow you to configure the list of specified countries.

Default list of countries
US Only
All countries except selected
Only selected countries
Complete list of countries

Once you have made your choices and selected them, just click “Update”. And don’t forget to re-publish your Order Settings so that the changes take effect on the live site as well.

Information for this article has been taken from Yahoo! Help

Should I have a Blog?

Joe Everett — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:55:23 +0000

AH blogging, the craze that has taken over the web since the early 90’s. It seems like everyone is blogging these days. Between all of the social networking sites, blogging almost seems to be a staple to the web experience. But is it a right move for a business? And if so, why?

There are multiple reasons for “blogging your business”. Number one on the list of all time greatest reasons is your search engine rankings. Having a blog associated to your site will definitely assist your search engine rankings thereby giving you more exposure. Reason number two, is Customer Relationships. By having a blog where your customers can provide feedback, ask questions and you can in turn converse with them over these topics you are providing a personal connection with your customers and it works well. Reason number three on my list, flexibility! Not many realize that having a blog is more than just having a blog, or posting your ideas or new business information. It is an extension of your store, and can be designed to look like your store, have similar navigation and become a fully integrated part of your customers shopping experience. You have so much flexibility with blowing because you can use it as just that a blog, or you can use it for faq’s or any number of things that you can possibly think of!

But what if you don’t have a Yahoo! Store. What if you don’t want to sell your services online, but simply want to have an Informational website? No problem, blogging has that covered as well! A blog can be designed as an informational website, that allows you to advertise your business, without the pesky posting issues to keep up with. It functions the same as any other website, and saves you time because it is easy to use, and money because they are extremely cost effective.

So no matter who you are, what level of business you conduct, or weather you have an online store or not, there is no reason for you not to include a blog in your web portfolio. Happy blogging!

YouTube and your Yahoo! Store.

Joe Everett — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:53:29 +0000

I don’t know about you, but YouTube is on my list of top spots to check out whenever I am browsing the web. This thing that started out as a tiny online community of video posters, has now become part of our culture and daily lives. Need some instruction on how to do a little something? Get it on YouTube. You want to have a video blog? Do it on YouTube. Want to laugh hysterically until you rupture a blood vessel while watching someone do something insanely ridiculous, go to YouTube! You name it, its there. But what does this mean for you, your business and your yahoo store? Well just like you have heard from us before about how online networking sites like FaceBook.com and Twitter.com can be used as business tools for marketing and letting your customers know what’s new, YouTube can present a way for you to provide videos on your website about your products, news and events, or even demonstrations of what you have to offer. You can create an account right at YouTube.com and create your own videos, or you can use videos that others have posted. They provide all of the HTML that you can copy right from the site to post the video on your website. But once you have got the HTML, what do you do with it? Follow these easy steps, and watch the YouTube craze start making you money.

Step 1: Obtain the HTML code of the video you want to link on your site from the Video Page (Copy and pasting is the easiest method).
Step 2: Navigate to the page you would like to post it on in your store editor and click edit.
Step 3: Paste the code into the “Caption” field and click the Update button.

Once you begin doing this you will begin to realize that the videos often post on your page as a larger size than you would prefer. No problem! In the HTML that you have pasted in you will see a line that looks like this . The width and height are your video sizes. you can adjust the numbers between the quotes to be higher or lower until you have found the size that you like. Keep in mind that there are two spots in your HTML code with the width and height options, one in the beginning of the HTML and one near the end. Make sure you change them both, otherwise the size won’t change.

Thats all there is to it! Now you have everything you need to hop in the back of the YouTube station wagon and go for a spin. If you have ever been shopping online and thought “I wish I could see how it worked before I bought it” then you can now realize that posting applicable video content for your customers and services will just give your customers one more reason to shop with you, and buy with you. It could be the difference between closing that sale, and never knowing that your missing it. Happy YouTubing!

Having Great Backup!

Joe Everett — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:24:12 +0000

So by now you know what makes a great E-Commerce store. You know how it works, what to do, and what your customers are looking for. But what makes a great customer service experience? Having great backup! We have made some new additions in your Technical Support team to make sure you have got the best support available so that you’re always keeping your customers happy! Here is your latest and greatest Technical Support Engineers.

From left to right: Nathan, Kim, Warren, Matthew, Isaac, and Joe.

You see the chair there with the photo on it? That’s George. He is one of your Feed Perfect Grand Masters as well as a little of everything else. He is so brilliant that he doesn’t even need to be present to fix things. At the time that this photo was taken we have unconfirmed reports that he was writing a code to make the world spin in the opposite direction (no ergonomic chairs were harmed in the making of this photograph). Kim has also moved into using her supreme powers in our Software as a Service team. We miss her in technical support but our SaaS team is extremely happy to have her!

Now that you know that you have great backup, and an E-Commerce store that has the potential to control the Universe, you can feel confident that every success you have, is a success for us here in Technical Support.

Can I use HTML in my item description, like if I want to add a picture or a link?

Kim Good — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:25:56 +0000

Yes you absolutely can! In doing so, you will want to be sure that the image (if you are using an image) is uploaded to your Yahoo! Store, or to a public location such as Flickr or Google Photos. You can then use the HTML to reference the location of the image.

Please keep in mind that you will want to be cautious as to how much HTML you use for this as using to much may negatively impact your website.