Michael Roebuck's Blog

In an effort to improve security, Yahoo! will be upgrading the pro-forma script (form submission) functionality. If you are using the Yahoo! Form script, this applies to you. Merchants typically use this for newsletter signups, "contact us" forms, or price-quote requests. The pro-forma script security changes will ensure form submissions are properly associated with a store ID and that all email recipients of form submissions are approved. Once the changes are in place, your site will be automatically protected. However, you must take immediate action to use the new approved format for the pro-forma functionality. Otherwise, you may not receive submissions using the old format.

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WHAT STEPS DO I NEED TO TAKE?
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New URL for form submissions.
The following change will be required within your form tags sent to this script:
<form method="post" action="http://<accountname/yhst1234>.stores.yahoo.net/cgi-bin
/pro-forma">
where "accountname" is your store ID or yhst number. You will need to confirm this revised tag is used for each form sent to this script on your site. After updating the URL for form submissions, you will need to publish your site.

Approved email recipients.
Previously, any names listed within the form as values for owner received the email:
<input type=hidden name="owner" value="me@myname.com">

With this update, merchants must now enter the list of approved form submission recipients in the "Email To" field of the Form Submissions section in the Order Emails page (or the Fax & Email page for Merchant Solutions Standard and Professional merchants). Email addresses should be entered one per line. If you have a form that uses an email address not specified in the "Email To" field, that form submission will not be delivered.

Thank-you URL and Continue-URL under your store domain.
Previously, merchants could specify any URL to take shoppers to for the confirmation page (thankyou-URL) or after leaving the confirmation page (continue-URL):
<input type=hidden name="continue-url" value="http://anydomain.com">

Now merchants will need to specify a page within their store domain to send shoppers to.
<input type=hidden name="continue-url" value="http://merchantdomain.com">

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HOW DO I KNOW MY FORMS ARE SET UP CORRECTLY?
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If you have active forms on your site but are not receiving form submissions, then you likely have not made all of the required changes.

Confirm your form is submitting to the new URL:
<form method="post" action="http://<accountname>.stores.yahoo.net/cgi-bin/pro-forma">
and that you are using the correct account name.

Ensure that any email address listed in your forms also appears in the "Email To" field on the Order Emails page (Fax & Email for Standard and Professional accounts). You should receive emails of the form submissions to the owner addresses specified in your form, provided you are submitting the form to the new URL and have specified all email addresses.

Ensure your shoppers are being directed to a confirmation page under your domain after submitting the form and after continuing from the confirmation page.

For full details about the newly revised pro-forma functionality, please refer to Yahoo! help documentation.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/edit/regular
/regular-12.html

Labels: form, script, 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

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

The question of whether or not you should use the Hackersafe or ControlScan type security logos on your Yahoo! Store has always been a mystery to me that I've been fighting with for some time now. On one hand, they claim to make users feel safe and secure and thus increase sales. On the other hand, Yahoo Stores are already scanned and already secure. Why pay for a service when I can create my own logo and link to a page describing Yahoo! Store Security?

I've recently had the opportunity to meet two wonderful people. Cresta Pillsbury from Hackersafe and Savannah Finney from ControlScan. By "wonderful", I really mean "wonderful." You won't find two nicer, more professional people anywhere, who bend over backwards to help you. My life has improved just by knowing them. Yes, they are that great. Unfortunately, this is business and my clients expect me to make and save them money.

HackerSafe Test

Hackersafe allowed us to run an A/B test on one of our clients. Half of the visitors saw the Hackersafe logo, the other half didn't. I felt the Hackersafe A/B data was a little skewed as they tagged duplicates by the same IP address. I fixed this by manually removing repeats who didn't have an order number. What I found was Hackersafe counted 112 legitimate orders as repeats and thus weren't included in the results they provided. In actuality, these 112 orders were repeat customers and should have been included. I have 25 days of data comprised of 1831 orders.

To throw another wrench into the test, this client sends an email blast out about every 2 days. Apparently, email can skew the results because existing customers already trust us and the HackerSafe logo has less of an impact. Because of this, I went one step farther and looked at each of the 1831 orders. Yahoo! gives me the ability to track if they are new or repeat customers so I looked at the days where new customers placed more orders than repeat customers. Of those days, it was a fairly even split of orders placed whether they saw the HackerSafe logo or not.

In aggregate, in the 25 day test period, I noticed an increase of orders of 4% (as opposed to the 12% HackerSafe claims). Because of the increase, I'm still skeptical, but we are willing to continue the tests. We'll run the HackerSafe logo on a full time basis for a few months and see what happens. Until then, I'm afraid I still haven't answered the question of whether or not you should pay for the HackerSafe logo. You should though, test it and be sure to look at the data file provided and review that data yourself. If you need any help or find any flaws in my methodology, give me a call.

ControlScan Test

ControlScan was going to let us do an A/B test but they use a third party software package that isn't that compatible with Yahoo. Because of that, we had to go by sales alone. In a 3 week period, the sales after ControlScan was added were fairly level with the 3 weeks prior. We think we could squeeze a 1% increase to ControlScan. Certainly not enough to justify itself.

This was actually very surprising to me because ControlScan consisted of tall skyscraper banners as well as a banner on the top of the website and check-out pages. HackerSafe was only a tiny little banner on the top of the website. I really thought ControlScan would outperform HackerSafe. Needless to say we removed the ControlScan banners and will follow up with a HackerSafe A/B test.

Final Word

Test, Test, Test. Results will differ on everyone's website. The websites we added the banners too already had a link to Yahoo security. We were really testing whether or not the name recognition of the banners would increase sales. Everybody I spoke with at the client site hadn't even heard of HackerSafe or ControlScan and nobody cared or said they would click on the banner to see what it was. The Marketing Director recently went to a site and noticed the HackerSafe logo but only because she knew we were testing it with her site. Is a commercial logo really better than just writing that your order is secure on the website headers? Does a customer really recognize "HackerSafe" or "ControlScan" as better than, "Your order is Secure" or a homemade "Site Security" banner linking to a descriptive page on your own website?

I can't show you the client banners we created and I'm not sure if I can copy the HackerSafe logos, but what would mean more to you:

Hackersafe Banner reading:
"HackerSafe tested July 13, 2007"

ControlScan Banner reading:
"verified July 13, 2007 - Verified Secure"

Client A:
"Secure Shopping - learn more"

Client B:
"Site Security - Yahoo Shopping"

Client C:
"ECommerce by Yahoo!"

I guess I still have to fight with myself on whether or not we want to recommend this product or not. Certainly bigger companies are using it, but does that make it right? If anybody has any information on these or other site security services, please comment or let me know.

Labels: controlscan, hackersafe, security, yahoo

I will be in San Jose attending the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition from June 4-7. Internet Retailer is the world's largest conference in e-retailing, where more than 4,000 online merchants from retail chains, catalog firms, web-only merchants and consumer manufacturers will share ideas and experiences on the one thing they have in common: web-based retailing. This is usually a good show and I come back with some great ideas for all my clients.

This year Kelly, one of our RTML Yahoo! Designers, is coming with me and we will be exhibiting with Yahoo at there booth. We recently exhibited with Yahoo at the PESA conference in Chicago and had a great time. Yahoo invited us to this show and we will be in the exhibit booth on Tuesday, June 5th from 11:00am to 3:00pm. Please stop by and say, "Hello!"

Karl Ribas, All Web's Project Manager will be attending the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle at the same time. It seems to be a great week for trade shows!

If you are in San Jose or Seattle, be sure to let us know. If not, I'm sure I'll post an update throughout the week and Karl will be updating about the SMX show.

Labels: internet, retailer, yahoo

My good friend and co-worker, Karl Ribas was recently interviewed by Joe Balestrino with Mr. SEO. I'm a bit behind in my podcasts and finally got to hear his interview this morning. It was a great discussion about PPC advertising. As with every great discussion, I feel my two cents worth will only make them better. So, as you listen to this great podcast, here is my 2 cents worth....

1 Cent: My first cent involves the ability to run A/B tests with Google Adwords. Joe briefly stated the ability was there but I feel that topic needs more time. The ability to run an A/B test will help virtually every aspect of PPC advertising, from landing page design to ad copy. When asked what to avoid in ad copy, Karl mentioned each business was different. Well, how can you tell what works for your business if you don't run A/B tests? Google make the ability to test so easy, that not to test, is a crime. Changing one word in your ad can make a big conversion difference. (Karl mentioned Rob Snell; Our friend and Yahoo Store conversion expert) By running against a control, you can guage just how much of a difference you'll get.

By testing different landing pages within same viewable ad, you can test various aspects of your landing page copy. Yahoo trackable links make testing not only your ads but the landing pages easy as pie!

By the way, Yahoo Search Marketing also allows for ad copy A/B testing as well.

In short, the ability to do A/B testing is easy to do and a necessity. Call me (or Karl) if you get stuck or need any help.

2 Cent: My second cent involves Karl's comment about his use of Yahoo Search if he wanted to buy something and Google search if he was researching. I think he's wrong. Some people might say that different people search using different engines and different styles, but since he doesn't follow my style, he's wrong. (Joke)

I search differently. If I'm looking to buy something, I use Google Adwords because those people are paying for the ad and therefore want to sell something. If I'm researching, I use the organic results and Alta Vista. I like to read reviews on Amazon or other sites where people review. Organic results are chock full of independent reviews on why something is good or bad.

For example, Kelly sold me on the Cingular Blackjack phone. Before I buy, I want to see other reviews so I search Google for "Cingular Blackjack" and read the organic results showing me various opinions and reviews that have been published. When I'm ready to buy, I click on the paid links. Alta Vista provides good organic results as well.

OK. There you have it. My 2 cents worth on Karl's interview with Mr. SEO. Please be sure to listen to the Podcast and all Joe's podcasts as they are very educational and informative for the seasoned SEO person as well as the do it yourselfer. It's full of legitimate information and not fluff about what the speakers did over the weekend. Karl's blog is great as well! Check them both out:

Karl Ribas Blog

Mr. SEO

Labels: balestrino, google, karl, ppc, ribas, seo, yahoo

If you haven't read my post on accepting PayPal as a payment option within your Yahoo! Store, you need to read it. Then, you need to read on....

PayPal and Yahoo! have partnered to launch a major new promotion for Yahoo! Store Merchants. Recently they completed an updated checkout flow for Yahoo! Stores that allows customers to checkout quickly by using PayPal Express Checkout.

Yahoo! clients that take advantage of this new checkout flow get a special shopping cart icon next to your Sponsored Search ads to show searchers that you accept PayPal for payments.

In addition, clients get $100 credit in Yahoo! Sponsered Search credit.

A $100 credit is nice, but the best part is you will pay no PayPal transaction fees through the end of the year on orders completed through PayPal Express Checkout. Did you catch that? NO PAYPAL FEES. It's a beautiful thing!

More Details can be found here: www.paypal.com/yahoosearch or contact us. We'll be glad to help you get set up.

Labels: paypal, store, yahoo

All Web Promotion has been invited to work the Yahoo! exhibit booth at the Professional Ebay Sellers Alliance trade show in Chicago, Wednesday, April 25.

We are very excited about the opportunity to work side by side with Yahoo. As Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Developers, we feel we can assist the attendees with there questions about Yahoo! and how we can assist them in developing there own Yahoo! Storefront.

I am very familliar with eBay. I've attended a couple eBay Live shows and happen to be a Gold Powerseller myself. I'm familliar with and am sure eBay will be pushing there own web based platform; ProStores. We here at All Web Promotion have developed ProStores sites and decided not to pursue the endeavor as we believe Yahoo! just can't be beat. Sure ProStores integrates with eBay but my opinion is that's about it. Both platforms have monthly fees and transaction fees so pricing is basically a wash. The differences come in the features of each account level. Yahoo! has Merchant Starter, Standard and Professional while ProStores has Business, Advanced and Enterprise.

If you are attending the Trade Show, stop by and say, "Hello" on Wednesday, April 25. We'd love to see you and tell you why we believe Yahoo! Merchant Solutions is the best fit for your web site needs.

Labels: ebay, prostores, yahoo

I was recently interviewed by Yahoo! for the the Insights Newsletter. You can read the interview in it's entirety here: Yahoo Small Business - Insights - February 2007

February 2007

E-commerce transactions, for the most part, are built on trust. That's why it's crucial to establish a sense of confidence among your web site's customers and visitors, who often consider purchasing your products or services sight unseen. If your visitors are unfamiliar with your site or wares, they may have natural concerns about security, safety, service, and the quality of your products. Through careful use of logos, design, and copywriting, you can communicate that your web site and business practices are trustworthy. Here are some ways you can inspire trust in your customers through careful design.

Read full article here: Yahoo Small Business - Insights - February 2007

Labels: insights, yahoo