I seem to get this question a lot: can you use PHP with the Yahoo Store catalog? The short answer is unfortunately now. With store-tags you can access the catalog, any item and any property of any item from within an HTML page (running on Yahoo's server), but the same is not true for PHP scripts. Store tags are special tags you can embed inside any HTML page of a yahoo store, and those special tags are then replaced by the server with some referenced property of some item in the store catalog. Although store tags were meant to be used in web hosting Yahoo Stores, they actually do work in the Yahoo Store editor as well! You can easily try it out, pick a store tag (see here for store-tag info: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/tags/ ) and put it in any text field in the editor. While it would be a powerful feature of Yahoo Store to be able to use store-tags in PHP, because currently it is not supported, you are still have to rely on RTML and templates if you want to have more con...

Some online merchants consider a nice, professional store design just a gimmick, an unnecessary expense. They say, "if I have a great product people want and I provide good customer service, shoppers will come." This may be true for stores that cater to a narrow niche market with not much competition. But in general, when you have to compete with many other stores in your business, a good design is a must. Recently, a client of mine showed me this actual customer review : "Fast, fast shipping, and product delivered as described, I had never heard of this company, but would do business with again. I originally had doubts as the website was not that flashy, but happily I was proven wrong. I would give this company an A+!" This sale closed, but how many other visitors to this web site may have turned away, because the web site wasn't "flashy?" And by flashy, he really meant "professional-looking". Today, online shoppers have millions of options...

I've been banging my head against the wall with a problem. I've got an ImageReady HTML layout I had to put into a Yahoo Store, and everything was fine in Internet Explorer, but in Firefox, the layout was broken. Images were shifted up and down, left and right. I knew the new Yahoo Store Editor (version 3.0) now forces all the pages to be in Standards mode , so I had a feeling it had to do with that. Once I was reasonably sure that it wasn't some dumb mistake in the HTML, I started searching for some info on standard doctype, images, tables, and mozilla, and sure enough, I found it here . Sure, tables and images are not supposed to be used for layout anymore, but it is still a lot easier in many cases to splice a few pieces of an image together using tables to come up with a specific look. What I didn't know until now was the new standards actually broke the old habits... Not too great if you ask me, I always think that if something is updated it should always support w...

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...

Legacy stores have a "Files" button in the Yahoo! Store editor. This can be used to upload files to the store, things like pdf files, images, videos, whatever. It used to be that there was a separate "Files" library for the editor and for the published site - just like there is an editor version of your store and a published version. Well, apparently, there were some internal changes recently, and either this is not the case, or there is something with how Yahoo! Store resolves references to the file library. The issue: if you have a file (say, image.gif) in the file library, and your store has been published, back in the editor if you upload a new version of this existing file with the same name and try to reference it (as /lib/yourstoreid/image.gif, for example), you will see the old, published version, no matter how hard you try. The only solution at this point is to upload the new file and republish the site. After that, you'll see the new version. Obviously...

A client of mine asked me to figure out why her order status page - which contained only a simple HTML form - didn't work on her published site. It was a strange phenomenon, the page she created worked perfectly fine in the editor, but on the published site, all it showed was the word OK. This was really strange, as I couldn't see anything wrong with the HTML itself. Then, I thought, since the form used an outside service to return order status, maybe that service did something to the page. So I took the form out (leaving that order status page basically blank, with only the store header, navigation, and footer on it) and republished. Same thing! Only OK on the published site... Then I looked at the source of that page, and in the source there was nothing else except for OK. Now that was really strange, because in Yahoo! Store you cannot even create a page that does not at least have a regular web page layout like this: <html> <head> <title>No Name>/title...

You might have heard about LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) the leading provider of online chat that can be integrated into any web site (including any Yahoo Store.) With a service like that, you place a small piece of HTML code on your pages, and a "Live Help" image will appear on your pages. When a visitor has a question, they can simply click that image and initiate a chat with you (or one of your support personnel.) Or, you can initiate a chat from your end by inviting a visitor to chat. It is a great way to provide instant help and answer perhaps that last question that a potential customer might have. If you ever considered adding such a feature to your site (or if you haven't), I wanted to show you a similar tool I just found called Crafty Syntax Live Help . Crafty Syntax is a live help solution that allows you to offer live chat functionality to your visitors. And best of all, as opposed to other commercial chat packages, Crafty Syntax is free . That's right, i...