Even with the standard battleship gray side-buttons and other Yahoo! Store defaults, you can have a functional store. With only a few minor tweaks, you can have a very presentable ecommerce application. There are three levels of STORE EDITOR for the various experience levels of USERS. BEGINNER, REGULAR, & ADVANCED editing. The first level is really only good for learning the most basic Y!Store concepts. The Regular interface shows most of the features you'll be using on a daily basis. The ADVANCED EDITOR gives you access to everything you'll need to customize your Yahoo! Store from RTML templates to database uploads. Adding, Deleting, Editing & Moving products around is simple. It's very easy to teach your staff the most useful functions in a matter of minutes. If they're sophisticated enough to have an email account and browse the web, then they'll be able to handle the most common applications of a Yahoo! Store. Want to change the price on an item? Login at http://store.yahoo.com. Select the EDITOR. Go to the item page. Click EDIT. Change the Price. Click UPDATE. Go to the home page. Click PUBLISH. The price is now changed. You can also restrict different users to what information they can see by using the ACCESS feature. There are 15 predetermined looks with colors and fonts. The majority of stores on Y!Shopping use these looks, so if you want a unique look, you have to try a little harder, but these are a step up from the default gray templates. (Yuck!) Yahoo! Store offers customizable templates so beginners can get pretty good results with predefined HOME, SECTION, and PRODUCT page templates. Once you format the templates with the colors, fonts, and buttons you want, adding a new product or section that looks great is as easy as clicking one button to upload an image and write the product name, description, and price. Each product has its own separate page using static html which is better for search engines. Most ecommerce solutions rely on databases that dynamically generate the html as you are looking for something. Looking for POWERPUFF Underoos at a major entertainment e-tailer? Their database creates a page that lists all of the available POWERPUFF articles available for sale. Unfortunately, when the search engine robot comes crawling across their site, these pages don't get indexed. Advanced users can place html inside templates for a unique look. You can format text with html tags, add extra graphics stored in your FILES library, add simple forms, and even use your own HTML documents using the RAW-HTML template. Bulk uploads for larger catalogs are available for advanced users. If you have a database or text file of your products, you can use the BULK UPLOAD feature so you don't have to manually add each product. I created a 3500 item store using a distributor's catalog on a CD-ROM in about 3 hours one night. Power Users & Developers can build custom looks using RTML template scripting language. If you understand HTML tables, RTML isn't that hard. This proprietary language has very little documentation, but there is a group of enthusiasts in the Ystore Clubs forum who share RTML secrets and tips with each other. |
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