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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

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.

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