Live Support for your Yahoo! Store

You might have heard about LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) the leading provider of online chat that can be integrated into any web site (including any Yahoo Store.) With a service like that, you place a small piece of HTML code on your pages, and a "Live Help" image will appear on your pages. When a visitor has a question, they can simply click that image and initiate a chat with you (or one of your support personnel.) Or, you can initiate a chat from your end by inviting a visitor to chat. It is a great way to provide instant help and answer perhaps that last question that a potential customer might have.

If you ever considered adding such a feature to your site (or if you haven't), I wanted to show you a similar tool I just found called Crafty Syntax Live Help.

Crafty Syntax is a live help solution that allows you to offer live chat functionality to your visitors. And best of all, as opposed to other commercial chat packages, Crafty Syntax is free. That's right, it is an open source package that costs absolutely nothing. The creators leave it up to you to donate something to compensate them for their efforts (and if you end up using this tool, I encourage you to make a donation), but you pay no ongoing fees or setup fees, nothing.

Other commercial chat services typically charge you a monthly fee based on the number of "seats" or concurrent operators you have. Crafty Syntax also has the ability to add multiple operators, multiple departments, and more. Among other things, it allows you to:

• Track your visitors, and see which pages they visited or which page they are currently on
• Track how your visitors came to your site
• Track what keywords or keyphrases brought your visitors to your site
• Create "canned" responses
• Create a knowledge base or Q&A database you can direct your visitors to
• Set up frequently used links you can "push" to your visitors

and much more.

Setting up Crafty Syntax is relatively easy. You need to have a PHP/MySQL-enabled web hosting account (if you have a Merchant Solutions account other than the Starter package, then you are all set.) Simply download the installer from here then follow the installation instructions here. If you have are planning to install Crafty on your Merchant Solutions account, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. You have to enable your MySQL database if you haven’t already done so. To do this, follow the instructions at the http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/webhosting/mysql/mysql-03.html.

2. When installing Crafty, it will ask you for the MySQL server name. On Merchant Solutions, this is always mysql.