My Experience with Yahoo! Store

This article contains older information. Go here for newer information on ecommerce and selling online.

Regarding the June 14, 2000 topic in Doctor Ebiz, "Listings in Virtual Malls," http://doctorebiz.com/vol1/000614b.htm I wanted to give you our experience running a small store, and an indication of the traffic from Yahoo! Store and AltaVista Shopping.

A Norwegian friend and I decided to open a store selling Norwegian sweaters on the Internet in December 1999. Based on the advice of another storeowner, we hosted our store, Norway Sweaters. http://www.norwaysweaters.com at Yahoo! Store. From the beginning, the service has been superlative. The site is always up, and the tools work as advertised. Building the site is done through HTML templates, and everything is very easy to do, even for a neophyte. Of course, with templates, it's not as flexible as building from scratch, but then again, the site is much more likely to be browser-compatible, takes less effort to build, and it integrated with order entry, order tracking and traffic tracking tools. We pay $100 a month for a store with less than 50 items, plus 2% on sales over $5,000 in a month.

The real value of the Yahoo! Store is **active shoppers.** We receive hundreds of shoppers per month, people who come to us through searching in Yahoo! Shopping. More importantly, these are shoppers that are interested in buying, not "tire kickers" from some random search engine, most of whom are writing a paper for school or researching for a trip, not paying customers. Our web logs and sales records have shown us this. In our experience, this is a VERY inexpensive way to generate high quality traffic. Where else are you going to get good quality "foot traffic" for $100 a month, plus all the tools to build, host, and track a site?

Our experience with AltaVista Shopping was very poor. They wanted $3,000 for set-up, then a monthly database extract of our products, then 50 cents per click-through to our store. When we complained about the price, the salesperson dropped the set-up charge. With our look-to-buy ratio of less than 1%, that's $50+ per customer acquisition cost. We chuckled, then passed on this "opportunity." If your customer lifetime value is high, this might be worth it, but for us it was not viable.

Greg Close is also owns an Internet Consulting business, Affinisoft Corp., 902 NE 43rd Ave, Suite 7, Seattle, WA 98105, phone (206) 547-2396. http://www.affinisoft.com/