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Transition to Luminate

No doubt most of you know by know about the impending spin-off of Yahoo Small Business as a new company called Luminate. Today, Yahoo sent out a Questions and Answers document (https://help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-small-business/SLN26667.html) which has quite a bit of useful info, but we did receive a number of inquiries from our clients because, understandably, they are anxious about these forthcoming changes. Most of the questions we've got revolve around how the domain name changes will affect their stores.

So for starters, the domain name changes won't happen until the actual "spin-off" date, when Yahoo Small Business splits off from Yahoo. That date has not been announced yet. Some of you inferred from the Yahoo mailing that the domains will change on October 14, which is not the case.
At the time the spin-off happens, the yahoo domain names (for example the URL of the shopping cart, or search page) will change, BUT there will be automatic redirects in place to make sure that all of those links will continue to function seamlessly.

All of those domain names will eventually be changed for good, and at some point in the future, the existing yahoo domain names will stop working. That means that soon after the spin-off you should have your site checked and any hard-coded references to Yahoo domains should be changed in your templates, content, or linked files. Again, there is no rush for this, but it's something that should be done sooner or later following the spin-off. We will be offering a service to do this and are currently accepting orders for it, as we are expecting a larger than normal rush to perform this update soon after the spin-off. If you are interested, please reserve your spot here http://www.ytimes.com/luminate-transition.html as we will have to do this on a first-come-first-served basis.

We will keep you posted as things develop, but feel free to email us if you have any questions or concerns in the meantime.

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