Yahoo Merchant Solutions Review - Coupon Code

Yahoo Merchant Solutions offers three different plans that you can choose from including The Starter Plan, The Standard Plan & The Professional Plan. These three plans are meant for merchants of varying volumes of sales from a business that is just beginning to get its feet wet to a business that is generating a large number of sales.

Here're some features common to all plans offered by Yahoo Merchant Solutions:

The maximum number of products that you can sell are 50,000. This is a substantial figure sure to meet the requirement of most businesses. All plans will let you create websites in HTML editors such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage. There are third party tools you can use.

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You'll need a merchant account for running a business with Yahoo Merchant Solutions. You can either opt for First Data, the merchant account provider they have a tie-up with. There are no additional fees for using their payment gateway. For some reason if you want some other merchant account provider, you can do that too. Credit card verification and validation tools are offered and Offline credit card processing is also offered by Yahoo. They have several measures to control fraud and for risk-control. There's a detailed description on their website about this. You can accept credit card payments, besides you can take payments through Paypal for all plans. You can accept payments via checks, money orders, PO's (Pay Orders) and COD (Cash on delivery).

You can upload product data, import a product database and customize the checkout page with all plans offered by Yahoo Merchant Solutions. You can also run an affiliate program rewarding webmasters for sending traffic to your website, with all plans.

Let's consider which of the three plans is a better option:

You can opt for a higher plan if you expect to generate more sales and have a lower fee per transaction. While the one-time setup fee is the same $50 for all three plans, you pay much less per transaction in case of the profesional plan. The transaction fee is 1.5% for the starter plan, 1% for the Standard Plan and .75% in case of the Professional Plan.

The recurring fee is also different. The starter plan costs the least - it has a monthly recurring fee of $39.95 per month, the Yahoo Merchant Solutions Standard Plan costs $129.95 per month and the Professional plan is $299.95 per month. On the face of it, the starter plan may appear cheap but it's the Professional Plan which may save you the most money in case of a growing business.

The difference between the monthly fees of the starter plan ($39.95) and the Professional Plans ($299.95) is $266 a month. However the Professional Plan gives you a lower per-transaction rate. The difference between the per-transaction rate of the starter plan (1.5%) and the Professional Plan (0.75%) is 0.75%. This makes the starter plan twice as cheap as the Professional Plan! You're probably thinking about the $266 extra you have to pay. That's true but how long would it take for you to save that much? If you have an average sale of $1200 a day, you'll pay $18 as the per-transaction fee if you're on a starter plan. On the Professional Plan you'll pay only $9. This saves $9 every day or $270 in a month. So the Professional Plan pays for itself!

Let's figure out the sales figure needed to make it worth our while to opt for the Standard Plan - that costs $129.95 per month and has a 1% per-transaction fee as compared to the starter plan that costs $39.95 and has a 1.5% per-transaction fee. The difference between the per-transaction fee is 0.5% and you're paying $90 more for the 0.5% reduction in the per-transaction fee. With some math, we can figure out that if you have sales of $600 every day, with the starter plan we would pay $9 as processing fee while with the Standard Plan we would pay $6 as the fee. This saves $3 a day or $90 a month which makes the Standard Plan of Yahoo a more attractive option if you expect sales beyond $18,000 a month.

Yahoo Merchant Solutions Pricing is clear

You don't have to opt for the standard or Professional Plan from day 1 but it's a comforting thought when you think that you can upgrade at anytime to one of these two and save money. You don't have to bargain with the merchant solution provider because the pricing is quite cut-and-dried and will save you money. The starter plan will ensure you save money at the outset when you need to conserve cash for essential expenses and for advertising & marketing.

The above example assumes that you expect sales of atleast $18000-36,000 a month but you can benefit from opting for the standard even if you have a lower sale volume. There are some very important features that the starter plan doesn't offer and for which you must opt for the standard or Professional Plans. These include:

• Cross Selling
• Gift certificates
• Real-time integration with backend systems
• Notification of new orders by fax
• Export orders to UPS Worldship®
• Yahoo! Web Analytics for advanced, real-time reporting.
• Export to QuickBooks
• Marketing your website

Cross Selling 

Cross selling refers to suggesting related products to a shopper. If someone is buying a pair of athletic shoes, the system can automatically suggest socks for the shoes - this is a related purchase and since the visitor is already making a purchase he's far more likely to add the socks to his cart with a click. You generate more sales and more profits with this feature. You can also up-sell products, offer volume discounts, offer discounts on specific products and do a lot more.

Gift certificates

You can offer gift certificates for purchase. A shopper can buy a gift certificate and give it to someone who can then visit your online store to redeem it for products. This can certainly boost sales. People who're familiar with your brand or have been impressed with your quality can buy gift certificates. You can make bulk sales to companies looking for gifting options for their employees.

Real-time integration with backend systems

When a customer places an order Yahoo will automatically check if inventory is available in your offline inventory system. You can calculate shipping and taxes automatically. This saves you from the trouble of having to refund sales because a particular product is not available which can put off customers and also take up your valuable time. You can always disable a product if you don't have this feature but then that means back-orders also will not be placed for out-of-stock products. Real-time integration with backend systems is a key feature and you should have this if you can afford it.

Additionally you can receive inventory alerts when quantities are low and manage inventory by color, size, and other variables.

Notification of new orders by fax

You can get notified of new orders by fax. This is convenient if you want a fax sent to your despatch department or warehouse or if you're unable to check email several times a day.

Export orders to UPS Worldship®

Exporting to UPS Worldship® saves you time because you don't have to enter in the name and address all over again. It also eliminates the possibility of entering in a wrong zip code or address. Order processing can be fast and error-free. You'll be delegating work to others to ship your products and minimizing error is the best way to go. You can use major carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS. You can set shipping rates by weight, price, location amd offer free shipping. You can set tax rates by country, state and zip. You can ship orders to international locations and use UPS online tools.

Yahoo! Web Analytics for advanced, real-time reporting.

This tells you which are your most popular products, what is the percentage of people who add products to their carts but don't make a purchase finally. You can know how people find your website, which keywords they search for and which keywords are resulting in sales. E.g. if a lot of people search for 'nike shoes on sale' and buy on your website, you may also want to make pages for 'adidas shoes on sale' and 'reebok shoes on sale' and see if they convert too, Information is gold and you need to have as much information about the visitors to your website if you want to scale up your online business. This analysis program offered by Yahoo is alone worth $50 a month though it is free with the standard and Professional Plans.

Export to QuickBooks

You can export transaction information to QuickBooks.

Marketing your website

Yahoo is one of the three largest search engines online and gets a huge chunk of the internet traffic online. They leverage this to offer advantages to their merchant solutions customers. Your website will be automatically submitted to both Yahoo and Google. You also get a $100 free advertising voucher at Yahoo Search Advertising (Earlier called Overture), a $50 free ad voucher for Google AdWords, a $50 free trial voucher for Shopping.com, a $50 free trial account with Shopzilla. Besides this you get a free Yahoo! Local listing and a 1 month trial with Campaigner by Got (email marketing).
 
Overall, Yahoo Merchant Solutions with their large number of features and the reputed strong company backing it, inspires confidence. Yahoo offers 24-7 email and phone support for their merchant solutions. They seem to have thousands of merchants and many major brand names using their merchant solutions. With so many features and free advertising options, Yahoo Merchant Solutions is clearly a value-for-money service.

This review refers to a product or service available only in the United States.