Michael Roebuck's Blog

Cyber Monday. The biggest on-line shopping day, named because this Monday is the on-line equivalent to Black Friday; the largest shopping day of the year. On-line merchants were expecting a great day and we were prepared to make fast web site updates as merchants needed to make quick tweaks and updates to there sites. Unfortunately, Yahoo Merchant Solutions had a hiccup. Or maybe it was a Heart Attack.

I'm not going to bash Yahoo. Others are going to do enough of that for me. We all know Yahoo had issues. We all had a false sense of security and most of all, we all lost money. How much money? It's unknown as of this post, but the Yahoo Shopping Carts were down for most of the day so you can do the math.

What does this mean for Yahoo? Will clients jump ship? I certainly hope not. While this is certainly a problem and serious money has been lost, it is not a regular occurance. We very rarely have problems with Yahoo and they are always operational. I've been monitoring sites every 5 minutes for years now and can only remember one instance where a client site went down because of Yahoo: (Early April, 2004. PAIX telephone line issues.)

I still believe that if we owned our own servers and this happened, we'd be on the phone with outsourced techs trying to resolve it or the one IT person would be trying to figure it out. It would probably take days to resolve and happen more often. I would guess that Yahoo has more than one IT guy and there are probably numerous people with lots of letters after there names working very hard at fixing this. Yes, Yahoo is going through troubled times and yes, this outage is a serious problem, but as a whole, Yahoo has been very stable. Before you jump on the Yahoo bashing wagon which I'm sure will appear, think about all the good things that happen because of Yahoo. It's still early and we won't know the full effects of this problem for a while yet. That aside, I imagine we'll muddle through. Hopefully Yahoo has learned something and this won't happen again and hopefully we'll be able to create some sort of backup system. But think about this: Where else can you get so much with a scalable solution that benefits the small guy? Yes, there is other competition, but there isn't any other like Yahoo!

Don't know what happened to Yahoo? Here is a Link to Bill Hartzers' Blog with links to various news stories.

Labels: black, christmas, cyber, friday, merchant, monday, solutions, thanksgiving, yahoo

Wow! It's been a month since I've uploaded a post. Where does the time go? It's definitely been a busy month and I have several ideas for posts, but time escapes me. My wife and I are still looking for a house and that seems to be taking up most evenings. We really don't want to build, but because she runs a home business, most new subdivisions restrict what she can do. Anyway, that's a blog post in itself and should be titled something about why I don't drink because buying a house will certainly make you start!

Anyway, A couple new features at Yahoo! that you need to know about. The new Cross Sell feature and the Keyword Finder feature. Both are wonderful tools that will save you time and energy.

The Cross Sell Feature allows you to cross sell items on both your shopping cart page and the actual item pages. This is beautiful! If you are already using cross sell, you know the headache of having to create the cross sell list based upon item codes. Unfortunately, that headache is still there, but they have introduced a new feature that will automatically make suggestions based upon past customers' purchase and navigation history data to suggest products that are most likely to convert to sales. This is nice!

If you are not already using Cross Sell, please give it a try. All of my stores using it have shown sales based on this feature. In short, it works! And now that it can be automatic, it's easy! More information can be found on the Yahoo! Cross Sell help page.

The other new tool is the Keyword Finder. This is a great tool that will highlight specific keywords that have helped lead shoppers to your on-line store and make a purchase. The system automatically identifies the most relevant and effective keywords by using data from activity on your store, as well as traffic driven by search marketing campaigns on Yahoo and other search engines. You can then download the list of keywords to use in your existing campaigns or start new ones.

You might already use a keyword research tool that suggests keywords based upon Search Engine use. The Yahoo! Keyword Finder suggests keywords based upon your own sites history; thereby suggesting keywords that are generating sales. Be careful though, it only suggests keywords where people have bought something. You still need to be aware of industry keywords because you might be missing sales if you aren't aware of specific industry terms. More information can be found on the Yahoo! Keyword Finder help page.

The next time you have a few minutes to play around, I highly suggest looking at these two new features. Especially with Christmas right around the corner, you may have the opportunity to increase sales a bit. That would be nice!

Labels: cross-sell, keyword, yahoo