Catalog Manager (for non-legacy Yahoo Stores) provides a nicer, easier to use interface to update your products. You can sort and page through your items, look for items using simple and advanced searches, or edit or delete multiple items at once, tasks that are not very easily done in the store editor. If you ever work in Catalog Manager, you may also have noticed the "Publish" button there. The inline help says, if you publish your catalog, all the changes will be immediately visible on your site. You may be tempted to use this function particularly if your editor usually takes a long time to publish, however, if your store is an editor-based store, publishing the catalog separately from the editor is not for you. Catalog Manager was originally created to allow access to the product catalog for stores that are built on the web hosting account using "store tags". Today, of the thousands of Yahoo stores very few use store tags (and I don't recommend it eithe...

As indicated in Yahoo Small Business's recent blog post of upcoming features , the long-awaited "incremental publish" feature is being rolled out this month. They are going server by server, so some merchants will see the change sooner then others. What is incremental publish? Incremental publish keeps track of what pages you edited and changed since the last time you published the store. Instead of the single "Publish" button, you will now have two buttons, one that says "Publish All", and the other that says "Publish Changes". "Publish All" does the same as the current "Publish" button, it generates and publishes all pages in the store. "Publish Changes", on the other hand, will only publish the pages that changed. This can be a huge potential time saver especially for large stores whose publish takes hours normally.

Although the Yahoo! Floating Cart is considered pretty much bug free by Yahoo (you can look at the official open issues list here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/floatingcart/floatingcart-09.html ) , there are some pretty "interesting" issues still, so since I keep running into them, I decided to post them here along with the work-arounds. The following issues all occur with multi-add forms only. 1) If you have your quantity set up as anything other than a simple text box (for example a drop-down SELECT box), the floating cart will not take the quantity value. It will take vwquantity as a customer-selected option. The workaround: use a text box instead. Nothing else works currently. 2) If you have a script that checks if the shopper made a selection from a drop-down (basically, any kind of an "onsubmit" handler), the floating cart will still receive the item, even if you cancel the submit event. The workaround: put the event handler on the click...

I get this question often. Or variations of it such as "is it safe to expand my site to 1200px now?" According to W3Scools , as of January of this year, about 13% of all internet users are still on 1024x768, which is a high enough proportion to make me play it safe and set the max width at 980px so that these folks can see the site OK. If you go any higher, these people will have to scroll sideways, which is traditionally a major "no-no" (simply because it's annoying.) However, you should check your own stats to see what percentage of YOUR visitors have that resolution, because your demographic segment may very well be different from the average.

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...