In a non-legacy Yahoo Store, there are two ways to add custom fields: through Catalog Manager under "Manage my Tables" and through the Store Editor, under "Types" (the Store Editor's "Types" are essentially the same as Catalog Manager's "Tables".) Whether you add custom fields from Catalog Manager or from the Store Editor does make a difference as each has its advantages as well as disadvantages. Catalog Manager To me the main advantages of using Catalog Manager to add custom fields are: 1) You can add multiple fields quicker 2) You can later change the field's name and even type 3) You can delete the field if you no longer need it. 4) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are included in the data.csv file if you download your catalog. 5) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are also included in the catalog.xml datafeed file, which is used by the comparison shopping engines, for example. (See the Search ...

Back in September of 2007 I wrote a post here about using the ONCE RTML operator to speed up the yahoo store editor . In that article I mentioned that the ONCE operator has two modes, one to evaluate the operator's body once per publish and the other, once per page. What I said there was that while ONCE :publish has great potentials and practical uses, ONCE :page wasn't too useful. Well, today I must correct that statement, as I recently discovered two ways to use ONCE :page. To recap, a statement like this: TEXT ONCE :page GRAB CALL :some-template will evaluate the body of the ONCE operator once on the page and output its result. So in the example above, it would only call the template called some-template once on each page and output whatever some-template writes to the page. So far so good, if you have this block only once on the page, then having ONCE :page in it makes no difference. Now consider this: some Yahoo! Stores have a breadcrumbs trail both at the top and at t...

I keep having to field questions about the product-url field, and since it came up yesterday, I figured I'd try to clear up all the confusion about it. So the name product-url suggests that whatever you type in there will become the URL of that product. Unfortunately, this is not the case, or rather, not in the intuitive way. The URL you enter there will be used as the URL for that product in Yahoo Shopping, on the built-in search results page, and on the shopping cart page, however, the URL you type in there DOES NOT actually change the physical URL of the page. What is the URL of a page in a Yahoo Store? In any Yahoo Store built in the store editor, the URL of a page is the store's domain name and the page ID + .html. For example, in my store at www.ytimes.info, I have a page whose id is rtml101, thehrefore, the URL of that page is http://www.ytimes.info/rtml101.html . Why would you want to change the URL? For SEO reasons, it is believed to be better to have a URL tha...

If you are like me, you spend most of your day editing pages in the Yahoo Store editor. And if you do that, you probably spend quite a bit of time navigating to pages and waiting for those pages to load in the editor before being able to edit them. All this waiting really drives me crazy so I kept thinking of ways to speed up my work while working in the editor. One shortcut I always use - if I know thet ID of the page I want to edit - is to erase the last part of the URL while in the editor, and enter the page's Id I want to edit with .html?dired=1 appended to it. For example, if I'm in the editor, and I want to edit the ind.html page, I'd look at the Address field of my browser: http://ytimes.us-dc1-edit.store.yahoo.net/RT/NEWEDIT.ytimes/d695ff542abb/CD7fAAIJ (just an example) erase CD7fAAIJ and add ind.html?dired=1 to it so it looks like: http://ytimes.us-dc1-edit.store.yahoo.net/RT/NEWEDIT.ytimes/d695ff542abb/ind.html?dired=1 and hit Enter. This will take me to the edit...

You often hear the phrase "bigger is better". Sometimes it's true but not when it comes to JavaScript or CSS code in your Yahoo! Store pages. If you include JavaScript code or CSS either as linked files (the preferred method) or embedded inside your pages (obviously not preferred), making these files as small as possible should be your goal. Why? This is no rocket science: smaller files mean faster page loads = happy customers. Ok, so what bloats JavaScript code? In general, white space (tabs, carriage returns, non-used spaces), comments, and the actual code, such as variable and function names. You have control over all of these, however, if you don't use white spaces, carriage returns or comments, it will be immensely difficult to understand and modify your code. And not just for others, you too. There are many commercial JavaScript compression tools around, but I've been using this handy and free utility: http://www.andrewkesper.com/jscrush/ This little utilit...

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, to...

The following is an excerpt from my conversation with Cathy Salamone of Direct Digital Photography . The use of imagery on any e-commerce web site can have far-reaching consequences. Read what the expert has to say about the subject. How long have you been doing professional photography? - Our Studio Opened in 1980 back then we went by the name "Studio A"- Since hen we have been providing photographic images for Advertising and Industry. How did you get into digital photography? - In 1994 we were approached by a cutting edge printing house offering ua partnership in their newest adventure "Digital Photography". We moved to their facility, changed our name tp "Direct Digital Photography" and entered into a brave new world. Back then no one had ever heard of digital photography-so it was a difficult sale. There were many challenges and being on he cutting edge was a bloody place but we paved the road and got an education about he new technology that very ...