Signing Up for the Yahoo Merchant Starter Plan - A Few Aspects to Consider
Yahoo Merchant Solutions offers three different plans. Consider if you're choosing the right one. These plans are structured differently and offer varying features. They meet the requirements of startup bedroom operations to relatively larger operations with hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. You can change from one plan to the other anytime. You don't have to start with the most expensive plan if you're not sure about the volume of business you're going to do. All the plans will let you sell up to 50,000 products. Where they differ is the cost structure.
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No long term contract necessary
The Yahoo Merchant starter Plan makes it easy for even those who are new to internet businesses to set up shop online. There's a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor that helps you manage your website and integrate your products within your site without having to do anything under the hood. If you're not a programmer, the good news is that you don't have to be. You don't have to hire someone and spend hundreds of dollars either. Yahoo Merchant Solutions has thousands of template designs for you to choose from for your store. They support all major html editors including Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe GoLive etc. You do have the option of hiring a developer specializing in Yahoo stores. There are quite a few of them and they'll customize your Yahoo store for a fee.
Unlike many other similar solution providers Yahoo Merchant Solutions doesn't insist on a long term contract. You can cancel your account at any time you choose to. Another feature that we like is that Yahoo takes regular backups of your data and doesn't bill you extra for this. They ensure that your data can be recovered in case of an emergency or a natural disaster. They also place backups of your data at a remote geographical location. Additionally they backup your data on tapes to ensure that there's never a situation where you lose valuable data. Yahoo Merchant Solutions accepts all major credit cards during the signup process including Visa®, Mastercard®, American Express®, Discover® Card, Carte Blanche® and Diners Club®.
Do you have a credit card merchant account?
Yahoo doesn't provide merchant accounts, neither with the Yahoo Merchant Starter Plan nor with more expensive plans. You need to have a merchant account if you have to accept payments through Yahoo Merchant Solutions. They do have a tie-up with First Data however and you can easily accept credit cards through them. You can alternatively set up a merchant account with some other provider and use Yahoo merchant solutions for taking your orders. Yahoo Merchant Solutions also lets you take Paypal payments. This in itself is a huge market available to you. Many people are more comfortable paying via Paypal than using their credit card on the website of a merchant they've never heard of or not dealt with before.
Are you planning to advertise online?
One of the quickest ways to start getting targeted traffic to your website is to advertise in the search engines. When you speak of search engine paid placement, the two biggest are Google and Yahoo. Merchant Solutions from Yahoo come with free ad vouchers for advertising on both these search engines. So while you're paying $39.95 to sign up, You actually get a $100 free ad voucher for Yahoo! Search Marketing, a $50 ad voucher for Google Adwords, a free Yahoo local listing, a free $50 trial on Shopping.com, $50 of free traffic from Shopzilla.com and a 1 month free email marketing trial. Additionally your website gets submitted free of cost automatically to both Yahoo and Google. These are free ad benefits of over $200. If you're planning to advertise online and wondering where you'll be able to raise the money for this, the ad vouchers will give you a headstart. Once sales start coming in thanks to the ad spends, you can plough the profits back into your business. Ad vouchers are available with the Yahoo Merchant Starter Plan as well as the higher plans.
Click here to go to Yahoo Small Business to read about setting up and managing your business at Yahoo. It includes information about the sign up process, Store building tools including the Store Editor, Catalog Manager, Order Processing, Shipping and Promotion.
Here's an article about how the various Yahoo Merchant Solutions Plans' differ in their cost structure and what it means to you.
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Yahoo Merchant Starter plan ad vouchers sweeten the deal
I signed up for the Yahoo Merchant Starter plan late last year and I fully agree with the advertising vouchers being helpful. They helped me get valuable traffic to my website which I would have otherwise had to spend hundreds of dollars getting. One major reason I signed up at Yahoo was this. Another was that Yahoo is a large company. My earlier experience was with a host that had an impressive website but turned out to be a bunch of kids doing a summer job with a start up. They went back to school and technical support was horrible. Since then I swore off small companies. The brand plays a big role for me and so I went with Yahoo. Tech support has never been a problem. These guys are helpful and friendly. I usually call their toll-free line.
These days every cent that you can save is useful and with this plan you get more than 200 bucks of ad vouchers free. What I don't like is that the lowest per-transaction fee is only available on the most expensive plan. Yet I cannot deny that for less than $30 per month, the Yahoo Merchant Starter plan is probably the best value-for-money plan in the quality segment. There's no reason to go for the highest plan unless you're going to start off with huge sales running into hundreds of $s. If you want to keep your costs low this is the plan for it. You can change over to a higher plan anytime like I plan to, next month.