Providing the best possible experience for our customers is our biggest priority at Yahoo Small Business, and an important part of that is making sure we hire the best talent. Leading up to the expected separation and the introduction of Luminate later this year, we’re continuing to focus on expanding our executive team, which is why I’m very excited to let you know about three key additions to the team: Chris Wayne, our new head of IT and Infrastructure, Matt Cokely, our new head of Customer Care, and Brandon Cruse, our new head of HR.
Below is a little bit about Chris, Matt, and Brandon, and why we’re thrilled to have them on board.
Chris Wayne, Head of IT and Infrastructure As a Yahoo veteran of more than 12 years, Chris Wayne knows the ins and outs of the company. During his tenure, Chris led the Service Reliability Engineering team (or, as he likes to call it, the “technical firefighters”), where he was responsible for keeping Yahoo’s sites up and running. In his new role as the head of IT and Infrastructure, Chris has the important job of ensuring the technology behind our product is scalable, dependable, fast and secure.
Prior to Yahoo, Chris also served our country in the military where he was a combat engineer demolitions expert, a paratrooper in the 82nd division, and rose through the ranks to Sergeant. This unique background shows Chris’ loyalty, integrity, and honor, which he brings to the company everyday. I can’t think of a better person to entrust with maintaining our technology, which is the foundation of the services we offer.
Matt Cokely, Head of Customer Care Matt is no stranger to Yahoo Small Business; in fact, some of you may recognize his name. Matt has been at Yahoo for 10 years, and was most recently the Director of Product Support Management. He also worked in customer support for Small Business and as an escalation engineer. And prior to Yahoo, he was a web developer by trade, so he has extensive knowledge of the backend of online stores and sites.
Matt is very familiar with our business, and has spent years building relationships with many of you. Because of this, he understands your wants and needs and is deeply invested in your success.
As we welcome Matt back to the Small Business team, he’ll be spending his time reconnecting, listening to your feedback, and providing real value for each of your small businesses. Matt will also be intimately involved in the rollout of many product initiatives we have planned to ensure customer success.
Brandon Cruse, Head of Human Resources Brandon Cruse has many years of experience in HR, and we are thrilled to welcome him to the team. In his new role, Brandon will take a non-traditional HR approach, drawing from his experience working at a high energy startup and high growth larger company environments, with the goal of creating a results-driven, innovative, collegial, and most importantly, a customer-focused culture for our employees.
Most recently, Brandon was at Intuit and has experience managing HR for a global corporation. He also worked with a healthcare IT company where he learned the importance of a nimble, startup environment. With expertise in both large tech companies and smaller startups, he’s uniquely positioned to help us create a more dynamic culture, which is tantamount to the success of our team – and in turn allows them to give you the best possible care and attention.
These three new key hires ensure we have the best and the brightest to engage our customers and our employees. Our future is looking luminous.
By Phil Grier Yahoo Small Business Merchant Development
Cyber
Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) and Black Friday (the day after
Thanksgiving) are historically the two busiest online shopping days of the year
for many online retailers. Some retailers on our platform can make up to 30% of
their annual sales during these few days after Thanksgiving. We expect to see
more orders placed via mobile devices this holiday season than ever before.
Since it’s such an important time, we drilled into last year’s ecommerce sales
data to help you maximize your store’s sales this holiday season.
Let’s
start by looking at the Top 10 online shopping days for all Yahoo stores
combined in 2014.
Here
are some insights we can gain from this data.
1.
Six of the top ten sales days are Mondays and Tuesdays. Make sure you are
stocked up and are ready for business coming out of the weekend, because your
buyers are headed back to work, where they evidently do a lot of online
shopping.
2.
The third and seventh highest online sales days in the holiday season were
December 15 and 16. These are the last minute shoppers. Try to highlight
your fast shipping times during these days. Include a holiday shipping calendar
so shoppers know how late they can buy from you. Have a list of items that will
ship last minute if you can’t guarantee all items will ship on time.
3.
The day after Cyber Monday reported the fifth highest revenue day of the year. If
you normally run a sale from Black Friday through Cyber Monday to incentivize
conversion, think about including Tuesday, December 2 as well.
4.
An interesting omission from this Top 10 list is the Saturday right in the
middle of the Black Friday to Cyber Monday spread. This is “Small Business Saturday”, which promotes making purchases locally at brick-and-mortar small businesses, so if you have a physical location hopefully you see increased sales to make up for lower online sales. Otherwise, Saturdays are the lowest online revenue days of the week year-round,
and this busiest time of year is no exception.
Armed
with this data, be aggressive with your advertising and promotions especially
on these days when shoppers will be out in force. You’ll want to be front and
center, ready to convert.
It
looks like we need to come up with more catchy names for these dates!
Converting visitors to paying customers continues to be an evolving challenge for online merchants. And mobile devices – smartphones and tablets – only add to the complexity. While more than 50% of ecommerce visits occur on mobile devices, consumers still prefer to use their laptops and desktops more than 8 out of 10 times to complete their purchases.
PayPal’s OneTouch gives you the advantage you need
OneTouch radically simplifies how consumers purchase online with PayPal, through any device and with just one click – so they never leave your site. Online shoppers will now only have to enter their username and password one time, upon which they’ll be able to pay on any other participating merchant site without having to re-enter a username, password, credit card number, or shipping address. All their information is securely maintained in their online wallet so future purchases are simple, quick, and secure.
Early results show that merchants who offer One Touch experience increases in sales, average order values, customer adoption, and customer loyalty.
Get started with One Touch
Activating this new feature for your store is simple.
Select Payment Settings from your Yahoo Store Control Panel.
If you haven’t already done so, go to your Yahoo Store Control Panel and sign up today for Express Checkout.
By Amer Akhtar VP Product Management and Head of Yahoo Small Business
In April, we updated you on a unique opportunity for the Yahoo Small Business team to redefine our name and brand as we separate from Yahoo later this year. And today, we’re thrilled to share the new brand for Yahoo Small Business: Luminate.
Luminate reflects how we illuminate the path forward for our customers and underlines our commitment to helping small businesses grow.
You can read more about our new name and brand here. Customers and partners can expect a more detailed update in their inbox this week, and we’ll be sure to share additional updates here. Stay tuned!
Since I last posted about the progress of our business, I’ve traveled to Washington DC to talk to legislators about the unique impact and value of small businesses, met with many of you at our annual events, and have been working very hard with colleagues across Yahoo to ensure the success of the upcoming separation.
I had the great pleasure of speaking with many customers and partners at the Internet Retailer tradeshow and at our own Merchant Roadshows in Chicago, New York City, and Silicon Valley. Thank you to those that attended and shared your wisdom and your questions about the future of Yahoo Small Business. You can be confident that we are taking your input to heart as we continue to build great products for you, our loyal customers. In turn, I hope you found the events equally informative and inspiring.
We’ve continued the momentum on new product enhancements, and recently we announced the availability of the Google Trusted Stores program to Yahoo retailers and the launch of our new Gemini Ads App, which lets you easily create and manage ads that appear on Yahoo Search, sites, and apps.
Further, I am happy to report that there is a concerted effort between the wider Yahoo and Yahoo Small Business teams that is allowing for our Yahoo Small Business team to focus on business continuity and accelerated product development. In addition, we continue to progress on the new brand identity for our business, and we’re looking forward to sharing that with you as soon as possible.
By Shameek Chakravarty Yahoo Small Business Director Product Management
We are excited to share that the new Yahoo Gemini Ads app is now available in beta via Yahoo Commerce Central.
The Yahoo Gemini Ads app lets you easily create and manage ads that appear on Yahoo Search, sites, and apps. This latest release streamlines the onboarding process so that there is no need to set up a separate Yahoo Gemini account. Additionally, precise targeting options and end-to-end analytics from click to purchase make this a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal.
This app is currently available only for Yahoo Merchant Solutions and Yahoo Stores customers and will be made available to other store platforms in a few weeks.
Designed to make sales for you in 4 easy steps
1. The Yahoo Gemini Ads app connects to your catalog daily and fetches updated product information. Using this data, the Yahoo Gemini Ads app automatically creates ads for you based on top-selling items in your store.
Initial ads and targeting criteria are created based on what we know about your store, including product categories sold in your store and your store tagline. You can also create your own ads and target them to specific keywords and interest categories.
2. Through a direct feed, the app then pushes these ads to the Yahoo Gemini ad marketplace.
3. The Yahoo Gemini Ads app manages the campaign and optimizes bids to ensure optimal ROI for your monthly budget, as measured in traffic and sales.
4. The Yahoo Gemini advertising platform seamlessly blends your ads with the right content for the right audiences, and shows the ads on Yahoo Search, sites, and apps.
The app also provides built-in conversion tracking, without the need to set up additional tracking pixels, so you can measure the impact of each ad on your traffic and revenue, out of the box.
By Shiva Prakash Yahoo Small Business Director Product Management
We’re pleased to announce that Yahoo Small Business and Google have worked together to make the free Google Trusted Stores program available to all Yahoo Merchant Solutions retailers. Google Trusted Stores can increase traffic from Google and improve sales on retailer sites by highlighting retailers that offer a great shopping experience. The program will also be made available to users of the new Yahoo Stores platform in a second phase of development.
If you are a Merchant Solutions customer and would like to participate, register to receive your Google Trusted Stores ID. Use that ID to complete the required steps in the Merchant Solutions control panel to activate the feature on your store. Your store will then begin to transmit data to Google, which will assess your store’s eligibility and qualification criteria. Upon successful qualification, the Google Trusted Stores badge will appear on the store.
For more information, please refer to the Google Trusted Stores program page here.
Fixed an issue that caused the wrong sitemap.xml to display.
Merchant Solutions
Features
An adaptive mobile checkout solution is now available. The default design has been configured to closely match the look and feel of the mobile storefront solution.
You can now preview your mobile storefront in the editor by clicking the ‘Mobile Mode’ button in the editor toolbar.
The default mobile storefront template now includes a link that allows the shopper to switch to the desktop view.
Additional options have been added to Risk Tools to help combat fraud and and invalid orders.
Maintenance
Updated security certificates.
Fixed an issue that caused the catalog API to return malformed item options.
Commerce Central
Added associated order IDs to the Google Shopping app.
We’re excited to share two mobile enhancements for our merchants: Mobile Checkout and Mobile Storefront Preview.
Mobile Checkout
Mobile Checkout for all Merchant Solutions accounts are now available, bringing business process consistency, intuitive usability, and a consistent look and feel.
Business process consistency: Mobile Checkout for the buyer is set to require the same input that web checkout requires, thereby ensuring continuity in merchants business processes. As before, merchants will continue to configure checkout settings (such as choosing to allow annotations for gift packaging, editing or adding checkout field names) in the checkout settings module of the control panel. The structure of checkout on mobile will remain consistent with these settings in terms of number of steps, i.e. single or multi-page web checkouts will translate to single or multi-page mobile checkouts respectively to accommodate the diverse array of merchant requirements that we handle.
Usability: Mobile Checkout allows consumers a clean, intuitive and pleasant experience for all mobile devices. As always we encourage merchants to review both web and mobile checkouts and keep them efficient to improve conversion rates.
Look and Feel: By default, the new Mobile Checkout visual design is consistent with the new mobile store designs to optimize the shopping experience. However, merchants can change this design via cascading style sheet (CSS) updates on the new Mobile Checkout configuration page to reflect their custom designs.
Finally, Merchants who were already using a custom mobile storefront design (and therefore didn’t need the Yahoo provided mobile storefront), should also consider the Mobile Checkout if they do not already have a mobile checkout solution.
Roll out: The Mobile Checkout feature is available now for your store and you can enable it right away. To ensure that merchants who may miss this message are not left behind, Yahoo will automate the activation of the new Mobile Checkout for stores who satisfy the following criteria:
1. The store is already using the Yahoo provided mobile storefront design
2. The store does not have any pending checkout settings that are not yet published. Please look for activation dates in your control panel.
For more information about the new mobile checkout please review this Help article.
Mobile Storefront Preview
In April, we launched a brand new adaptive mobile storefront for all Yahoo Merchant Solutions accounts. Last week, we added the ability to preview updates to mobile storefronts (similar to the preview capability for web storefronts) prior to publishing.
Please look for the Mobile Mode button under Store Editor to preview your mobile design prior to publishing changes. Note that you can also resize the viewport to imitate various physical display sizes.
Shiva Prakash Director, Product Management Yahoo Small Business
