There are many things to keep in mind when launching a new Yahoo! store, re-launching an existing store or making incremental upgrades to your Yahoo! store.
These are key questions to review:
1.    Can you be found? Is your site keyword rich and optimized for organic rankings with search engines? Where can people find your site and your products (is it on your business cards, fliers, in magazine ads)? Are you filing in the gaps of your organic SEO with paid SEO? Do you have a presence on other sites and social network sites? Here are two examples of social media sites but there are many.
-    Over 320 million people use Facebook. Almost half of all Internet use is now social networking, user generated content and like.
-    If YouTube was a standalone search engine, it would be the third largest search engine.
2.    Can your products be found? When people search for your types of products, are they able to find them? Does your navigation follow how your customers think or how you think?  And, is there a difference?
3.    Is your Yahoo store intelligent? Are you mining all of the right data that you have access to?  Both Yahoo Analytics and Google Analytics, in tandem, can help you make intelligent decisions on everything from what kind of ads you should run, which keywords are converting to sales, and which of your pages should be improved to lower the number of people leaving that page.
4.¬†¬† ¬†Are you converting shoppers to buyers? It’s a well-known and accepted fact that if you see conversion rates above 5 percent, then you should be celebrating.¬† Are you serving visitors and shoppers to the best possible conversion rate? You may need to add some content, navigation, functionality or features to improve the shopping experience. It can be as simple as enlarging and moving your order button to the top of your item page or adding display interactivity, user reviews, a smarter search, recommended items or aWishList feature. Keep this in mind that conversion can be incrementally enhanced with improved¬† Yahoo Store Design as well.
5.    Do you engage your customers after their purchase? Is your email solution dynamic or do you just add your customers to a generic list that you send out once a month or so? There are email systems and campaigners that don’t cost much but give you the ability to communicate better with your existing customers. When you have a happy customer they are more likely to shop and purchase from you again.
Try new things while sticking with your strengths: Do not to take your eye off the ball. You want to continue to do what you do best; but, your customer’s behavior is changing. It is about location, location, location, but not physical location. You customers, depending on their demographics, are watching more online videos, spending more time in social networks and accessing the web over a mobile device. They are using comparison shopping engines and search engines and are searching in YouTube and Facebook. Your customers are a moving target. You have to become an expert at what they care about, what they do online and what they are doing more of online now compared to six months ago.
Become a top expert in your product category while becoming an e-commerce expert: I live near the headquarters of the Safeway grocery store corporation. A local store here is used as a test bed. I constantly see businessmen and women looking and talking around products and shelf space. They know what people do in their stores, they record every move and transaction, and they do focus groups. It’s all about increasing the shopping cart size, the number of repeat visits, attracting new shoppers and all the while becoming an expert at product positioning and presentation.
Instead of video cameras and focus groups and teams of executives, you have tools such as Yahoo! Web Analytics, Google Analytics, Monitus, Top Right and an assortment of other add-ons, apps and feature enhancements that can help you become smarter and increase your bottom line by giving your customers what they want.
•    Monitus (A suite of tools to help you run your Yahoo store more efficiently)
•    FluidLite (An advanced display solution that can increase sales by over 10%)
•   PowerReviews Express (A top rated reviews solution that can increase your sales by over 15%)
•    TopRight (Email solution that can maximize sales by targeting customers based on their past purchases Adjust your email promotions based on actual revenue reporting.)
•   SingleFeed (SingleFeed helps online retailers submit, manage, and optimize product listings on top shopping sites through a single data feed.)
•    SLI (A search solution for your site that helps people find what they are looking for which increases sales)
Let us know at FastPivot if you are interested in getting special pricing for any of these Yahoo! Store enhancements and feature products. At FastPivot, we can integrate these tools directly into your Yahoo! store. Keep learning and have fun.
