Yahoo Store: The Best E-commerce Platform for SEO

Written by Scott Smigler


If you’re a small business with a goal of doing between $500,000 and $15 million in annual e-commerce sales, you need to learn more about Yahoo Merchant Solutions. And to answer your first question… no, Exclusive Concepts, Inc is not in any way affiliated with Yahoo. I’ve simply been persuaded overrepparttar past 6 years that Yahoo providesrepparttar 140176 most powerful and scaleable e-commerce solution forrepparttar 140177 small business that cares about search engine placement. Why should you care about search engine placement? Search engines arerepparttar 140178 single most powerful and cost-effective mechanism for driving qualified traffic to your site. What good is a great online store if customers can’t find you?

First things first – What is Yahoo Merchant Solutions (a.k.a. “Yahoo Store”)

It’s a complete platform for building an e-commerce website for your company. It has a easy to use forms-based interface (for a low cost entry-level solution), but it also has very advanced capabilities that allow third-party Yahoo Store specialists to customizerepparttar 140179 design and features of your site (for companies that need greater functionality and customization and are willing to make a larger investment).

What makesrepparttar 140180 Yahoo Store so outstanding?

If you visitedrepparttar 140181 Yahoo Merchant Solutions website, you would find a number of valuable features that make Yahoo Store appealing. Instead of repeating that list, I’ll focus instead on what I believe to berepparttar 140182 most important feature of a Yahoo Store from a search engine ranking perspective.

Static Pages – The Search Engines Eat These Things Up

Before you glaze over from this obscure technical phrase, consider that this single Yahoo Store benefit, if properly taken advantage of, can berepparttar 140183 difference between having a wildly profitable e-commerce store, and just an average online presence. I’m sure I have your attention now, so let me explain.

”Static Pages” means that when you publish your Yahoo Store (to makerepparttar 140184 store available torepparttar 140185 public),repparttar 140186 program actually regenerates every single “database” page and turns it into an “.html” page. The search engines have an easier time indexing “.html” pages, and as a result, you can expect better and more consistent rankings. I’m sure that for many of you this will sound confusing, so let me give you an example:

•Most dynamic e-commerce sites have interior pages that are “dynamic,” meaning that they are pulled from a database as you browserepparttar 140187 site. The “URL” for one of these pages might look like this:

http://www.somesitelink.com/prodcat=24?id=2?s=1352556232252535

•A Yahoo Store interior page is “static,” meaning thatrepparttar 140188 pages are not pulled from a database as you browserepparttar 140189 site. They might look like this:

http://www.youryahoostorelink.com/books.html

This is important because it is easier for search engines (like Google) to index a website that has static pages, as compared to dynamic sites with many parameters. Google says so on their website.

Be realistic when selling on eBay....

Written by Richard Grady


Copyright 2005 Richard Grady

As some of you know, I spent many years buying and selling both on and offline and several of my products are based upon my own experience in this area. I know thatrepparttar vast majority of my customers and subscribers have an interest in trading whether it be on eBay or atrepparttar 140010 local market but more and more I am seeing people with completely unrealistic expectations of what they will be able to do. Most commonly these unrealistic expectations are in respect of how much it actually costs to purchase specific products and what they can then be sold on for.

I regularly get emails from people who want to know where they can purchase products such as mobile (cell) phones, new release DVDs, Playstation games and similar at, say, a 50% discount to resell on eBay. The fact is that such a thing is not available - it is a simple case of supply and demand and competition.

Take DVDs for example, most people think that these are excellent products to resell on eBay because they are very popular, not particularly expensive and easy to package and ship. Unfortunately, they could not be more wrong. The DVD market is one ofrepparttar 140011 most competitive that there is - take a look for yourself and see how many auctions there are on eBay for DVDs at any one time. I have just looked and counted almost 300,000! At any one time there will only be a certain number of buyers wanting to purchase a particular DVD and if you take into accountrepparttar 140012 numerous different places there are that each buyer could purchase from, it is likely that in general, there will be more copies of an individual DVD available than there are buyers to purchase them. This situation causes prices to fall. The other factor that forces prices down isrepparttar 140013 fact that one DVD isrepparttar 140014 same as another. By this I mean that from a buyers point of view, there is no difference to a new DVD purchased on eBay to one which is purchased from their local DVD store. Oftenrepparttar 140015 only way to differentiate is on price and of course,repparttar 140016 only way to makerepparttar 140017 price more attractive to a buyer is to lower it.

The above reasons help to explain whyrepparttar 140018 wholesale discount on a new release DVD is just £1 or £2 at most ($2 or $3 roughly inrepparttar 140019 US). When you take into accountrepparttar 140020 fact thatrepparttar 140021 large retail chains can purchase thousands of DVDs at a time and receive a bigger discount than individual traders, you soon see why it is very difficult for a small business to compete in such a competitive industry. You simply cannot purchase new release DVDs at 50% discount and even if you could, it wouldn't be long before prices were forced down as there is always someone willing to sell a little bit cheaper thanrepparttar 140022 next man.

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