Skip to main content

Yahoo! Store Login Policy Update

With the July 30, 2008 Store Manager / Editor update a few shortcuts we came to love because useless overnight. For example:

- Rob Snell's Magic Edit button no longer works. There is an update on this at the Yahoo! Store forums.

- You cannot just type http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.yourstoreid into the address bar of the browser and go directly to the editor. Now, it will ALWAYS dump you into the Store Manager first.

- You cannot be logged into more than one store simultaneously.

The folks at Yahoo Small Business said these changes were necessary to tighten security. Ok, I buy that, and appreciate the fact that they are continuously looking for ways to make our stores more secures. My problem, though, is that I felt these changes seriously limited me in my daily work. Ok, I work with Yahoo Stores for a living, so maybe not everybody has 5-10 different stores open in different tabs all at the same time. But there are merchants who run multiple Yahoo Stores, and they are, too, affected by these changes.

So, what can you do?

The good news is there are workarounds.

  1. If you are using Firefox, check out CookiePie from Nektra.com. CookiePie is a Firefox add-on that lets you treat each tab as a completely different "sandbox". This allows you not only to be logged into multiple Yahoo Stores at the same time (like before); it also allows you to log in with different Yahoo! Id's in different tabs! Essentially this add-on turns each browser tab into a world in itself. By far the coolest solution!

  2. If you don't normally use Firefox you should! Ok, joke's aside, if you are an Internet Explorer fan, you can still open different stores if you start entirely different instances of Internet Explorer and open the different stores in these different instances. The emphasis is on different instance. So you actually have to double-click that IE icon multiple times; selecting New Window or New Tab from the File menu won't do it.

  3. You can open different stores in different browsers of course. For example, if you have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari installed on your computer (like I do), you can open completely different stores in each of those browsers.
But seriously, give CookiePie for Firefox a try, for me it was a lifesaver!

Comments

Istvan "RTML 101" Siposs said…
So far CookiePie has been working great, however, I noticed two things that don't work when CookiePie is enabled:

1) If you subscribe to GotCorp's Campaigner, you cannot go to your account by clicking Email Marketing in the Store Manager.

2) In Checkout Manager, you "Save and Preview".

So if you want to do one of these, you just have to disable CookiePie and try it again.
8/04/2008 11:57 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to expect when your redesign goes live

At Y-Times we roll out new designs, redesigns and other major upgrades to Yahoo stores on a fairly regular basis. Some of the main questions our clients ask are how to prepare for a roll-out and what to expect in terms of SEO and conversions when the changes go live? For any functional Yahoo store how well the site ranks and how well it converts are probably the two most important metrics. Since pretty much ANY change you make to any page can potentially alter either or both of these metrics, merchants may understandably feel nervous about far reaching alterations to their sites. However, when those functionality and design changes and additions are done right, there is really very little to fear. First off, what does it mean for a design or redesign to be "done right?" From the technical stand point, search engines look at the underlying structure of your site (the HTML, and increasingly also the CSS and JavaScript code) to try to extract information and meaning from i
Post a Comment
Read more

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins
Post a Comment
Read more

Pre-Season Checkup

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching it's a good idea to do a general checkup on your store to be sure it's ready for prime time. Below are a few things you would want to check, along with a few add-ons that are not too major in scope, but which are often neglected and give you an edge over your competition. Can you Search and Order? Every time we do anything major in a store we test two things: whether searching and adding to cart/ordering works. You can have nice, flashy pictures, cool animation effects, a very quick loading site, anything, but if the store search is broken or you can't add to the cart or can't check out then an ecommerce site is worth nothing. Can you Order? Chances are if your checkout was completely broken you'd know about it by now, but it doesn't have to be totally broken in order to scare away potential customers. So go ahead, go to your site and first do a search and make sure it works. Then, add one or more products
Post a Comment
Read more