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!
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.
By Phil Grier Yahoo Small Business Merchant Development
There are a handful of customer service emails that can make online retailers’ stomachs drop, and they usually start something like: “where’s my order,” “you made a mistake,” or even “I want a refund.” But the one that chills me to the bone is “I ordered from you and the next day I had multiple fraud charges on my card.”
Risk factors differ, but regardless of your ecommerce platform, if you accept card payment on your store, this can happen to you. It can indicate the beginning of a PR nightmare for your business and an almost certain headache. Here’s what you need to know to prevent it from happening.
No matter how secure your ecommerce platform, there are several innocuous places in the checkout process that scammers can use to steal your customer’s credit card data. The shocking thing is that most of the time this isn’t done with some super-complex hacking software or a sinister genius sitting in front of 40 monitors streaming code like in the movies. In most cases, the merchants themselves place the problem code or install the plugin and unwittingly cause the problem.
Any plug-in, extension or code could open a hole in the security of your cart if you aren’t careful. Many small business owners are not technically savvy enough to review all of the code involved to make sure these additions are secure (and this is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s really hard). Therefore some trust is involved anytime you extend the platform by adding plug-ins, extensions, and code. Nevertheless, if your cart is compromised, it is your responsibility as the retailer.
I recently witnessed a small business on another ecommerce platform catch fire on this issue. She had installed a well-rated extension that came from an apparently reputable developer. All seemed fine, and then her Facebook wall started filling up with complaints from customers who had their credit card data stolen after ordering from her. I could only imagine the email volume was huge as well. Small business owners aren’t prepared for this kind of thing and it’s easy to panic. She had no idea what was happening and tried to deflect. In the end, her brand was damaged because of a platform extension she had no training to code review for security.
In reaction to stories like these, operating systems and internet browsers continue to tighten security, particularly related to encrypted checkout. Red flags include having a lower encryption level than desired, a certificate that expires too far in the future, forms like search boxes that submit to insecure pages, and images that are pulled in over an insecure URL. But there can be many other issues, and these rules constantly change. The companies that run the most popular internet browsers and operating systems now force webmasters such as yourself and hosting companies to not only be secure, but “the desired level of secure” to avoid warnings. The security safe zone is always moving and your conversion hangs in the balance.
The solution for larger companies is a top-down full security appraisal that looks at local passwords, storage, networks, personnel, site code, email, and every place that could be leveraged for malicious intent to get card data. However, small businesses rarely have the resources to invest in such a thorough and expensive solution. So what can you do without breaking the bank?
Here are a few tips:
Review your access list. Remove anyone who does not need access to your site or store backend.
Frequently change your passwords.
Don’t store card numbers, and especially don’t store CVV codes. Depending on how you manage card numbers, card issuers can fine or revoke your ability to take their cards. And manually storing or collecting CVV codes is never permitted.
Work with trusted developers. Members of our developer network, at ysbdevelopers.com, are individually reviewed by us to help maintain high quality.
Get a security review of your checkout.
The last point bears a little more explanation. Most platforms let you place your own code, like javascript, in checkout. HTML can be used to show images. A search box is commonly seen. These are all vectors where malicious (or simply vulnerable) code can be unintentionally placed. Add-ons, plug-ins, and extensions designed to enhance checkout functionality may have access to all on-page data – including card numbers. Given the strong urgency around customer payment security, online retailers should have someone on-hand who knows what each snippet of non-core code in checkout does. This expert could be you, someone on your staff, or a trusted developer.
Just remember: A browser warning doesn’t always indicate a real problem, just like a green padlock doesn’t always indicate complete security. As the webmaster, you need to take responsibility for the code your site is running and get help or be prepared to learn a lot. Your brand’s trusted status may hang in the balance.
The Yahoo Small Business team is fast approaching a very exciting next step for our team and our customers. As you know, we’ll be transitioning at the end of this year to stand on our own two feet as an independent company. With that comes the unique opportunity to redefine our brand and name.
In the work of a marketer, there are few projects as exciting as this! It’s a huge challenge to look with new eyes at the current landscape, the customers served, and our strategy for future growth, and to roll all that information into a new identity.
To tackle this, in partnership with a strategic branding company, we’ve begun to break down the attributes and personality that we want our new name and brand to convey. We’ve worked closely with our cross-functional team to better focus our own perceptions, and we will expand that in the coming weeks to gather input from customers and partners as we quickly move through this process.
We’re excited to update you on our progress and look forward to sharing the new brand with you this summer. In the meantime, if you have thoughts on this topic, you can reach me, and the team responsible, at ysb-rebrand@yahoo-inc.com.
Some of our team at a recent brand strategy meeting.
It has been a whirlwind several weeks since I last posted about our plans and progress as a team and our upcoming spin, and I wanted to pause to share with you some of the activities that have been underway all geared toward empowering our customers with powerful tools to grow their businesses.
We’ve recently announced several updates to our products, including advancements on the new Yahoo Stores, enhancements to Yahoo Merchant Solutions, a new partnership with Yahoo Shopping, and a new feature for Live Store Badge, which is driving fantastic results for the stores that have it enabled.
In addition to these product enhancements, the team is excited for our new future and preparing for the new course that lies ahead. This quarter, we completed the transition of our India-based engineering team to the US, bringing all technical employees under one roof! We’re also in the process of expanding our engineering, marketing, and business development teams. With our engineering team working together here in Sunnyvale and important hires being made across our team, we’re poised better than ever to provide the best level of support for you, our customers.
Personally, I’ve been very busy sharing our spin-off news and talking to customers and partners. And in these conversations, I have learned a lot and uncovered some questions that I would like to address directly:
We are 100% committed, as always, to not making any major server/technology changes during the crucial holiday season. Additionally, we are not anticipating any major infrastructure transition this year. When any technology transition does occur, we anticipate no downtime for merchants.
Our customers and partners have been telling us what features are most important to them for our Yahoo Merchant Solutions product. We are listening and are staffing up to deliver on that list to make this already powerful product even stronger.
The team is busy preparing for this year’s events. We’ll be at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, in Chicago, June 2-5. If you’re planning on joining, please let us know! We’d love to host you at our customer and partner appreciation party. We’ll also be hosting three Yahoo Merchant Roadshows; check with your Account Manager for the one in your region.
As previously announced, we expect that the completion of the spin-off transaction will occur in Q4 2015. Yahoo Small Business will move to the new company prior to the completion of the transaction. We are working diligently with Yahoo to ensure there is a strong transition plan in place that allows us to take our time to thoughtfully design, test, and execute on all critical technology separations.
Again, I want to thank you for your continued business and trust in our team, and I hope you’re as excited about this new opportunity as we are!