Skip to main content

Upgrading to Merchant Solutions vs. Upgrading from V2 to V3

I get these questions from time to time about upgrading from legacy store to Merchant Solutions, vs upgrading a V2 template set to V3, so apparently this is still a confusing topic.

The two are two completely separate issues/topics.

First of all, how can you tell if you have a legacy store?

This is pretty easy, when you log into your store manager, it will say "Store" next to your store's name in the upper left corner in the blue band. If you have Merchant Solutions, it will say "Merchant Starter", "Merchant Standard" or "Merchant Professional".

Upgrading to Merchant Solutions

For the most part, this is only a question of money, because there is a different price structure for legacy store vs. the various Merchant Solutions packages. You can see a comparison of the various Merchant Solutions Plans here: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/compare-plans

So what do you get with Merchant Solutions that you don't have with legacy store?

Two things mainly, a separate conventional hosting account (typically site.yourdomainname.com) and the option to enable Catalog Manager.

The first thing, a conventional hosting account, may or may not impress you. There are professional hosting packages available from, say, GoDaddy for only a few bucks a month, and I'm sorry to say but Yahoo Web Hosting is lacking considerably in this department. In the name of security they restrict or disable a large number of otherwise standard PHP libraries. And then, there is a "hard" restriction of how many emails per day you can send out from your PHP code (currently 200 or 250), which makes the platform practically useless for many business applications.

The second one, access to Catalog Manager, is more compelling. Catalog Manager is not just another interface to your products, it also offers these advantages:

1) You will automatically have a catalog.xml datafeed which can be used by outside processes (like comparison shopping engines.)

2) You will be able to add, modify, and delete custom fields across your entire product line, something that can only be done one by one in Editor.

3) You let third party developers tap into your catalog via the new Catalog API to add custom functionality to your store.

One thing to note, though, is that you can upgrade to Merchant Solutions, but choose not to enable Catalog Manager.

Will you notice anything in your store editor if you upgrade to Merchant Solutions?

No. The editor will stay exactly the same, none of your data will be altered, so nothing at all will visibly change.

How about editor V2 vs. V3?

You can upgrade from V2 to V3 with or without Merchant Solutions by clicking the Design Wizard link in your store manager. What will the upgrade do? It will delete all of your custom templates, and change all of your pages to use a more up to date template set with a new look, which you select from a number of available templates. This has some very important implications: unless you have a cookie cutter V2 store (using the standard, built-in yahoo store templates), you probably want to think twice before pulling the trigger on this. If you have any kind of custom template work, it will be erased as part of your upgrade to V3. If you do have custom templates, I really don't recommend upgrading to V3. V3 has nothing that cannot be accomplished in V2 also.

Summary:
1) You can upgrade to Merchant Solutions and from V2 to V3 completely independently. One does not depend on the other.

2) You can only have Catalog Manager if you upgrade to Merchant Solutions


Istvan Siposs
Y-Times

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

How to create clean and efficient CSS

In a typical workday, I deal with dozens of yahoo stores and very often I have to tweak, fix, or change CSS used by these stores. While some stores have very clean and easy to follow style sheets or CSS definitions, the vast majority of stores I've seen seem to include complete hack jobs, style sheets put together completely haphazardly, or as an afterthought. While working in such a store, the idea came to me to turn my gripes into a post. So the following is my list of dos and don'ts of good CSS or style design. 1. Externalize your style sheets. This means to save your style sheets into one or more css files, and link to them using the <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/lib/yourstoreid/yourstyle.css"> notation, or in Editor V3.0, you can use the LINK operator. 2. Combine your style sheets into as few files as possible. Nothing worse than trying to wade through 6, 8, 10 or more different style sheets to find the color of a l
6 comments
Read more

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