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 customize design and features of your site (for companies that need greater functionality and customization and are willing to make a larger investment).

What makes Yahoo Store so outstanding?

If you visited 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 be 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 be 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 make store available to public), 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 browse 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 that pages are not pulled from a database as you browse site. They might look like this:

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

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 that vast majority of my customers and subscribers have an interest in trading whether it be on eBay or at 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 of 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 account 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 is fact that one DVD is 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. Often only way to differentiate is on price and of course, only way to make price more attractive to a buyer is to lower it.