A lot has happened since my last blog post! Now that we’re into the new year, I wanted to share with you what our team is focused on for 2016.
In December, Yahoo announced its decision to suspend work on its previously announced spin transaction, which included Aabaco Small Business. At that time, we updated our site with new information, and I want to take a moment in the new year to reiterate what this means for you, our customers.
We will continue to operate as Aabaco Small Business, and we remain a part of Yahoo. We have upgraded our server and web services infrastructure to provide better performance, greater stability, and faster innovation.
Our new sign-in process allows you to create your Aabaco ID, password, and profile (big thanks to those who have already done so!). This new native sign-in system will allow greater flexibility in responding to your profile management and security needs.
We continue to innovate our products and are incorporating the feedback we hear from you, our customers, on your most important priorities. For example, we have re-engineered several key components of our offerings, such as Business Mail, and made investments on the customer experience front, with advanced billing tools. For our Merchant Solutions/Stores customers, we are upgrading our analytics and search capabilities to provide a better experience for you and your customers. In response to your requests to help you bring in and retain more customers, we are piloting new products, including a physical beacon that lets brick-and-mortar retailers retarget shoppers (want to be part of the pilot? send an email to storebeacon@aabacosmallbusiness.com).
Our team has begun planning our annual customer events; we’ll share more information on dates, locations, and how you can take part soon.
I am excited about the work already underway here for 2016. On behalf of the whole Aabaco Small Business team, I would like to say a heartfelt “thank you” for your patience and loyalty through 2015. We remain dedicated to continuing to work hard for your business in 2016. Happy new year, and here’s to our next chapter!
This week is a time to give thanks and express gratitude, and we couldn’t be more appreciative of you, our customers. We know that the holiday season is a critical time for your business, and our number one priority is to ensure you have a successful and profitable time.
We are thrilled to share that last week, Yahoo Small Business successfully completed the technical migration and rebrand of our services before your busiest shopping days. We are now Aabaco Small Business, a name which aligns better with our soon-to-be parent company, Aabaco Holdings.
Most of you have already received an invitation to establish your new Aabaco Small Business credentials in order to manage your account. If you haven’t yet received this email, you will this week. Additionally, we encourage you to use this helpful Aabaco Small Business question and answer documentfor more information on the transition. While you will notice the luminate.com domain for several months in URLs and email addresses, our name and branding has been changed to Aabaco Small Business throughout our website and product experience.
Our transition to Aabaco Small Business is a unique opportunity for our team to redefine our name and our brand – and serve you, our customers, better than ever. We look forward to providing you with the best possible support and tools to run your business during the holidays and beyond.
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.
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.
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
