What is product-url anyway?

I keep having to field questions about the product-url field, and since it came up yesterday, I figured I'd try to clear up all the confusion about it.

So the name product-url suggests that whatever you type in there will become the URL of that product. Unfortunately, this is not the case, or rather, not in the intuitive way. The URL you enter there will be used as the URL for that product in Yahoo Shopping, on the built-in search results page, and on the shopping cart page, however, the URL you type in there DOES NOT actually change the physical URL of the page.

What is te URL of a page in a Yahoo Store?

In any Yahoo Store built in the store editor, the URL of a page is the store's domain name and the page ID + .html. For example, in my store at www.ytimes.info, I have a page whose id is rtml101, thehrefore, the URL of that page is http://www.ytimes.info/rtml101.html.

Why would you want to change the URL?

For SEO reasons, it is believed to be better to have a URL that includes keywords. When you simply create a page in the editor, the ID (therefore the page URL) gets generated automatically based on what you type in the "Name" field. This would normally be Ok, however, what the editor does is it sort of munges the words of the Name field together to come up with the id. For example, Book about yahoo store became bookabyahsto. Well, not particularly useful for SEO....

Can you change the URL then?

The short answer is no. Once a page has been created, it's ID - therefore its URL - is set for good. The only way to "change" it is to delete that page and re-create it with a different ID.

How can you specify the ID for a new page?

There are two ways to do this. If you are using database upload and generally manage your store from a CSV file, you can add a column called ID to your data file, and specify the ID there. Or, if you usually use the editor to create pages, then switch to Advanced Mode, then click "Contents", then "New". There you can specify the ID for your new page.

For well established pages (those with good ranking) I would not mess with the URL.

Ok, so what is product-url for then?

When Yahoo Store was transformed int Yahoo Merchant Solutions, one of the ideas was to make it possible to build a yahoo store on the web hosting platform and not in the store editor. Since stores that are built using store-tags on the web hosting platform of yahoo are on a different sub-domain than the store editor pages, there had to be a way to point the built-in search results page, the shopping cart page, or yahoo shopping to those alternate locations. That's where product-url came in. So if your store is built with store tags on the web hosting side, then you can (and should) continue to use product-url to specify your product's location. However, if your store is editor-based, then the best thing to do is to leave product-url blank.

Rapid Edit for the Yahoo! Store Editor

If you are like me, you spend most of your day editing pages in the Yahoo Store editor. And if you do that, you probably spend quite a bit of time navigating to pages and waiting for those pages to load in the editor before being able to edit them. All this waiting really drives me crazy so I kept thinking of ways to speed up my work while working in the editor. One shortcut I always use - if I know thet ID of the page I want to edit - is to erase the last part of the URL while in the editor, and enter the page's Id I want to edit with .html?dired=1 appended to it. For example, if I'm in the editor, and I want to edit the ind.html page, I'd look at the Address field of my browser:

http://ytimes.us-dc1-edit.store.yahoo.net/RT/NEWEDIT.ytimes/d695ff542abb/CD7fAAIJ (just an example)

erase CD7fAAIJ and add ind.html?dired=1 to it so it looks like:

http://ytimes.us-dc1-edit.store.yahoo.net/RT/NEWEDIT.ytimes/d695ff542abb/ind.html?dired=1

and hit Enter. This will take me to the edit form of the ind.html page - in this example but without loading the page itself. This is all great provided that you know the ID of the page you want to edit. But what if you don't know the ID?

Rapid Edit to the rescue!

I came up with a very useful template that can be installed into any Yahoo Store, and while in the store editor, it will put a red asterisk next to all text hyperlinks. When you click that red asterisk, it will open up the page belonging to that link in the edit form, without actually loading that page first. Imagine going to any section page, and without loading the target page, click this "magic" asterisk next to any link to open up that link in the editor! I only started using this a day or so ago and it already saved me hours of time - time otherwise I would have spent waiting for pages I wanted to edit to load. If you are familiar with Rob Snell's Magic Edit button (described in our Yahoo! Store Tips & Tricks book), this is like the Magic Edit button on steroids.

Read more about it at Rapid Edit.

Smaller is Better

You often hear the phrase "bigger is better". Sometimes it's true but not when it comes to JavaScript or CSS code in your Yahoo! Store pages. If you include JavaScript code or CSS either as linked files (the preferred method) or embedded inside your pages (obviously not preferred), making these files as small as possible should be your goal. Why? This is no rocket science: smaller files mean faster page loads = happy customers.

Ok, so what bloats JavaScript code? In general, white space (tabs, carriage returns, non-used spaces), comments, and the actual code, such as variable and function names.

You have control over all of these, however, if you don't use white spaces, carriage returns or comments, it will be immensely difficult to understand and modify your code. And not just for others, you too.

There are many commercial JavaScript compression tools around, but I've been using this handy and free utility: http://www.andrewkesper.com/jscrush/

This little utility can take any number of JavaScript files and automatically remove white spaces and comments from those files resulting in files considerably smaller in size than the originals. There are a couple of other advantages of this tool:

1. You can use it to compress CSS files as well, not just JavaScript files.
2. You can have it combine your source JavaScript files into a single, compressed file.

Happy compressing!

Yahoo! Store Login Policy Update

With the July 30, 2008 Store Manager / Editor update a few shortcuts we came to love because useless overnight. For example:

- Rob Snell's Magic Edit button no longer works. There is an update on this at the Yahoo! Store forums.

- You cannot just type http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.yourstoreid into the address bar of the browser and go directly to the editor. Now, it will ALWAYS dump you into the Store Manager first.

- You cannot be logged into more than one store simultaneously.

The folks at Yahoo Small Business said these changes were necessary to tighten security. Ok, I buy that, and appreciate the fact that they are continuously looking for ways to make our stores more secures. My problem, though, is that I felt these changes seriously limited me in my daily work. Ok, I work with Yahoo Stores for a living, so maybe not everybody has 5-10 different stores open in different tabs all at the same time. But there are merchants who run multiple Yahoo Stores, and they are, too, affected by these changes.

So, what can you do?

The good news is there are workarounds.

1. If you are using Firefox, check out CookiePie from Nektra.com. CookiePie is a Firefox add-on that lets you treat each tab as a completely different "sandbox". This allows you not only to be logged into multiple Yahoo Stores at the same time (like before); it also allows you to log in with different Yahoo! Id's in different tabs! Essentially this add-on turns each browser tab into a world in itself. By far the coolest solution!
   
   
2. If you don't normally use Firefox you should! Ok, joke's aside, if you are an Internet Explorer fan, you can still open different stores if you start entirely different instances of Internet Explorer and open the different stores in these different instances. The emphasis is on different instance. So you actually have to double-click that IE icon multiple times; selecting New Window or New Tab from the File menu won't do it.
   
   
3. You can open different stores in different browsers of course. For example, if you have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari installed on your computer (like I do), you can open completely different stores in each of those browsers.

But seriously, give CookiePie for Firefox a try, for me it was a lifesaver!

The importance of professional photography in e-commerce

The following is an excerpt from my conversation with Cathy Salamone of Direct Digital Photography. The use of imagery on any e-commerce web site can have far-reaching consequences. Read what the expert has to say about the subject.


How long have you been doing professional photography?

- Our Studio Opened in 1980 back then we went by the name "Studio A"- Since hen we have been providing photographic images for Advertising and Industry.

How did you get into digital photography?

- In 1994 we were approached by a cutting edge printing house offering ua partnership in their newest adventure "Digital Photography". We moved to their facility, changed our name tp "Direct Digital Photography" and entered into a brave new world. Back then no one had ever heard of digital photography-so it was a difficult sale. There were many challenges and being on he cutting edge was a bloody place but we paved the road and got an education about he new technology that very few photographers have the privilege to understand.

Many ecommerce web sites, especially start-up sites try to save money on web design and professional product photography. How important is it really to have professional product shots? Can't we just take any old digital camera and snap a few pictures of our products?

- Many new merchants make that costly mistake. Your online site is your business identity, and needs to reflect a professional, secure place for consumers to give personal financial information. The average consumer is accustomed to seeing very expensive advertising campaigns and they CAN see the difference. People starting up and trying to save money will go into a camera store and will be told that if they buy a digital camera system hey will get professional results. Even if they master the camera and computer controls- lighting and composition takes a lifetime to learn and every product needs to be addressed differently-there is no shot cut for experience. The result is many frustrating hours trying to achieve mediocre results and loss of sales resulting in an unsuccessful website and a money thrown away.

What is your opinion on using multiple photos to showcase the same product?

- As a product photography expert 99% of the time one dynamic photo is the best answer. A second photo usually cheapens the product- see examples of other advertising.

Are there differences in how you would photograph different types of merchandise? For instance, is there a difference between photographing clothes and electronic equipment?

- Huge differences in angles and lighting. This is why it was so difficult to teach my employees- every change of product need a different approach.

How can professional photography increase a store's conversion rate (entice shoppers to buy?)

- A picture is worth a thousand words. Unlike shopping in a regular store the photograph is going to close the sale-even if they know the product -a poorly lit product just looks unprofessional and questionable to do business with.

Can you share some tips with those who would like to do their own product photography?

- Buy your equipment from a local store that will give you support when your not achieving the results you expected. Even if online he same equipment is half the price- having someone review unsatisfactory results have a great dollar value.

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To contact Cathy, visit www.directdigitalphoto.com (and mention Y-Times to receive 10% off your first order.)

Simple trick to speed up your Yahoo! Store pages

If your store uses images or other files stored in the "Files" library, there is an easy trick to improve the response time of those files - and make your pages load faster.

Typically you reference files from the library using this relative URL:

/lib/yourstoreid/filename

where you replace yourstoreid with the Yahoo account ID of your store. This is generally fine, because the Store is smart enough to expand this to the actual location of the file, which is at

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/yourstoreid/filename

What I often see in stores is that the store operator enters things like this:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/lib/yourstoreid/filename

or

http://lib.store.yahoo.com/lib/yourstoreid/filename

What's wrong with that? Well, Yahoo! Store is still smart enough to find the correct file for you, but it doesn't come cheap. What happens is that the Yahoo! Store server does a redirect on these URLs so that they reference the file correctly from the lib.store.yahoo.net server. In a test I've done, these redirects generally took a little over 1,000 milliseconds - or one second. Now imagine if you had 10 or 20 such references in a page? Or inside a css file. It would slow your pages down and completely unnecessarily.

This can be even more pronounced on your checkout pages, where everything is served over an already slower SSL connection (yes, SSL is always slower than regular, unsecure HTTP://), and if you have relative URLs such as /lib/yourstoreid/... in your checkout pages, those will always be redirected. The fix is to use the absolute URL https://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/yourstoreid/... in your checkout pages, and http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/yourstoreid/... on the regular store editor pages. Be sure to do this not only in your HTML source but in all JavaScript and CSS files you use as well.

Catalog Request

You may have noticed that both the Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation pages are now customizable through Checkout Manager. If you have already customized your Checkout Manager pages (or had someone customize them for you), and would like to have the same custom look applied to your Catalog Request and Catalog Request Confirmation forms, all you have to do is this:

1. Go into Checkout Manager, click Page Configuration and then look at how your Shipping, Billing, Review, etc. pages are set up; in particular, check if you have the Top Navigation and Left Navigation enabled.
   
   
2. Click over to the Catalog Request tab, and make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation. Don't forget to hit Save or Save & Preview, otherwise your changes will be lost.
   
   
3. Click over to the Catalog Request Confirmation tab and there too, make sure you have the same settings next to Top Navigation and Left Navigation (so if those are enabled on your other checkout pages, enable them here too.) Again, don't forget to hit Save.
   
   
4. Click Store Manager then publish your order settings.

If you haven't enabled Checkout Manager or haven't customized your checkout manager pages, then of course this doesn't apply to you. If you are interested in having your checkout migrated to Checkout Manager, or having your Checkout Manager pages customized so all your checkout pages share the same look and feel as the rest of your store, read about our Yahoo! Store Checkout Customization service.