Michael Roebuck's Blog

Customize buyer-facing order number prefixes

By default, order numbers displayed to your store customers are prefixed with your store ID. For example, if a customer's order number is 792, and your store ID is yhst-12345678911011, the order number is displayed to the customer as yhst-12345678911011-792 on order confirmation and order status pages in checkout, in order and shipment confirmation emails, and on printed order materials (order invoice and packing slip).

Now, you can customize what comes before the order number, using the new "Order Number Prefix" field in the Shipment and Order Status section of Store Manager. If your store name is "Widget World" and you want to replace the store ID in the order number with "widget-world," you can now go right ahead. Your customized order number prefix will be shown in the buyer-facing locations noted above. (Merchants should note that for printed order materials, the custom order number prefix will appear on materials printed to PDF, but not on materials printed to HTML.)

Replace your store ID in order numbers using the "Order Number Prefix" field.

Custom order number prefix displayed in checkout.

Specify a sender name for order and shipment status emails

Order and shipment status emails use a default sender name in the "From" field, pulled from the "Title" variable in your Store Manager. Should you wish to customize the "From" field, you may do so using the "Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails" field in the Shipment and Order Status section of Store Manager. So if your "Title" variable was "All Paws Up - Pet Supplies for the Pampered Puppy," and you wanted your email sender name to simply be "All Paws Up," you can change this using the "Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails" field.

Customize the sender name used for order and shipment confirmation emails using the "Catalog Name for Confirmation/Update Emails" field.

If you haven't yet enabled order and shipment status emails and want to learn more about setting these up, please see the "Configuring shipping and order confirmation emails" help page.

Hope this helps customize your Yahoo! Store a little bit more! As always, contact us with any questions or if you need help implementing these updates.

Labels: confirmation, email, shipment, status, yahoo

The other day I tried sending an email to a Yahoo! Merchant Professional client and it was promptly returned to me stating the account had been suspended. This concerned me as I maintain the website and wasn't aware of anything. The website was live and working, but why wasn't this particular email address?

I logged into their email control panel and saw a message in red stating the email address had unusual activity and the account was blocked from sending, saving or receiving emails for up to 48 hours.

This was unacceptable as who can be without email for 48 hours? I called Yahoo! and had the engineers take a look around. A little later I received an email stating it was fixed. I responded it wasn't. Time ticked away and eventually I called back and was then advised to delete the over 416,000 unread messages in the account. Basically, my client saved copies of orders, delivery confirmations and apparently everything else that they ever received via email. I deleted the sent mail and few folders containing older confirmations and everything started working again.

Moral of the story.... If you use the webmail feature on Yahoo! Bizmail, delete some email every now and then!

Another Moral..... Deleting 100,000 emails 100 at a time via an Apple iPhone while sitting on the side of the road is not fun.

Labels: bizmail, email, yahoo