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Yahoo this week introduced a comparison shopping service and a trio of ecommerce packages to continue its drive into ecommerce.
Yahoo Product Search in Yahoo Shopping
Yahoo Product Search is an ecommerce search engine that will power the redesigned Yahoo Shopping service, offering a way for consumers to comparison shop online. Yahoo Shopping competes with DealTime (which changed its name to Shopping.com on Monday http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m09/i23/s04), MySimon.com, Pricegrabber.com and other comparison-shopping services.
Yahoo Shopping includes results from 17,000 merchants on its own platform, including items from its Yahoo Stores and Yahoo Auctions. Yahoo Shopping also searches a database of results that Inktomi pulls together from periodic crawls through the Web. Retailers will get picked up through these crawls, but they can also opt for paid inclusion in Yahoo Shopping search results.
Merchants can also choose to participate in the paid inclusion program. "Product Submit" allows merchants to participate and pay on per-click basis, with pricing ranging from 15 cents to over a dollar, depending on the product category. Amazon is submitting its data feed to Yahoo Shopping.
Yahoo's recently purchased Overture is supplying relevancy-based ads on the search results page, so merchants can participate in this service that is similar to Google Adwords.
Yahoo Merchant Solutions Replaces Yahoo Stores
Yahoo also introduced Yahoo Merchant Solutions, three new e-commerce packages that are seamlessly integrated with Yahoo Web Hosting services. Each plan includes domain name registration, business email, Web site hosting, and advanced ecommerce functionality. Basics including online payment processing, shopping cart and order management. All three packages provide round-the-clock toll-free phone support.
The low-end plant is called Merchant Starter and is priced at $39.95 per month with a 1.5% transaction fee (commission) and a $50 setup fee that will be waived until 12/31/03. It includes:
- E-commerce basics: online payment processing, shopping cart, and catalog management
- Built-in shopping cart, customer checkout, and order management system
- Domain name and 35 Business Mail accounts
- 350 MB of disk space and 35 GB of data transfer/month (bandwidth)
- Easy-to-use Yahoo! Web design tools and support for Microsoft FrontPage
- Credit card and person-to-person payment processing
- 24-hour toll-free phone support
The Yahoo Merchant Standard package for established businesses costs $99.95 per month with a 1% transaction fee and a $50 setup, and offers advanced merchandising tools and advanced scripting tools.
The Merchant Professional is for high volume sellers with pricing of $299.95 per month, a 0.75% transaction fee and a $50 setup. It offers priority customer support and pricing tailored to meet the needs of merchants with high volume sales.
What Yahoo Announcements Mean
Retailers can supply data feeds to multiple comparison search engines and services like Google's Froogle. As the holiday shopping season bears down on merchants, they can test out various services to try to get the most traffic for their advertising dollars. Some of the services allow feed submission for free, some charge a set up fee and charge on a per-click basis (performance fees). See AuctionBytes' article on shopping search and price comparison engines from last December at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y202/m12/abu0084/s02.
http://shopping.yahoo.com
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com
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