Ytimes' owner, Istvan Siposs, has graciously invited me to craft our company's email newsletter for this week. For those of you who I have yet to exchange with, I am Drea Solan (pronounced “Dray”), and have worked with Istvan for several years, serving in a blended role of E-Commerce Consultant/Partner and Project Manager for YTimes.  Over the years I have spoken to several hundred online merchants and have reviewed an even greater number of e-commerce web sites.  I look forward to connecting with even more of you in our YTimes online merchant community - you are indeed in good hands with our team here! Our email newsletter from last week, "Big Announcement from Google: Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Change is Only Weeks Away", received tremendous response as well as a number of follow-up questions. We are happy to have gotten the word out to all of you regarding Google's fast-approaching changes and it is good to see so many of you taking it serious...

Mobile traffic/e-commerce is here to stay. Three to five years ago mobile e-commerce was a small blip on analytics screens. Back then analysts predicted the trend to grow, and early adapters jumped the gun and either went for a dedicated mobile solution (in addition to their main site,) or a mobile app. Responsive design was really not part of the every day conversation among online retailers or web designers. Fast forward to 2015 and - depending on whose statistics you read - between 15 - 50% of traffic to e-commerce sites come from mobile devices. Look at your Google Analytics and check out the "Mobile" menu option. You'll see what percentage of your traffic now comes from mobile. You can also see how much revenue or conversion you get from mobile. (If you don't have that info it means that e-commerce tracking is not set up in your Google Analytics. Contact www.monitus.net; they offer such a solution with a bunch more bells and whistles for Yahoo Stor...

If you have a customized Yahoo! Store, chances are you are at least somewhat familiar with the “files library” in the store editor. The “files library” (“lib” for short) is an area where you can store files; all kinds of files such as images, css files, JavaScript files, videos, etc. You can access this area from your editor by clicking the “Files” button in your editor toolbar. Storing files in the “lib” has many advantages over storing files elsewhere (for example on your web hosting server.) The “lib” is measurably faster than web hosting (any file that comes from http://site.yourdomainname.com/... is hosted on your web hosting account and not in the “files library”.) In addition, all files stored in the “lib” are automatically “gzipped” , meaning they are compressed before sending across the web and decompressed by the browser resulting in a smaller payload – and therefore, faster delivery. But did you know that you can also have your “lib” hosted on a Content Delivery Network (C...

Does the time it takes to publish your store seem like an eternity? While a long publish time is usually caused by inefficiently written templates or very large number of pages in the store (or the combination of both), if you notice that the publish process seems to spend a lot of time at “Writing Library Files” or “Sending files to servers”, it may be time to do a “spring cleaning” in your files library. The files library is kind of like a general storage bin in your store’s editor (which you can access from the Editor by clicking the “Files” button.) It’s typically used to store images, css, and javascript files used in your store’s HTML, however, nothing prevents you from storing other types of files there if you want to. And since it provides you with virtually unlimited storage, it’s easy to get carried away and start dumping all kinds of files there and forgetting about them over time. But storing all kinds of junk in your files library comes at a price. When you hit the Publish...

As you may know, you can easily put HTML tags in your editor fields, such as the caption field, or the message field on the home page, or even in the head-tags variable, etc. I always encourage my clients to feel free to use some minimal formatting they may want to include in these fields, because doing so is relatively easy and really shouldn't require hiring a professional to do so. I always tell them also, to be careful with the HTML they put in those fields, and DO hire a professional if they find the need to add more complex HTML - for example, beyond just bolding words, or emphasizing phrases, etc. However, I keep coming across stores where merchant-edited HTML nearly bring the store to its knees. Yes, that actually can be done! Why? Because web pages - therefore Yahoo Store pages - are made up of HTML tags, so if you throw a wrench in there, expect things to break.... Adding simple formatting is harmless. You can easily bold words, change the appearance of fonts, etc. It b...

I'm helping a friend getting up and running with her brand new Yahoo Store, and we have a ton of high definition, high res product images. Besides the fact that images that are over 3 or 4,000 pixels tall or wide are really not very practical on screen, they are also way over the maximum parameters allowed by the Yahoo Store editor (parameters are: no more than 2,000 pixels in width or height, no more than 2 million pixels total, and no more than 2MB in size). Luckily, I found a freeware image viewer/batch conversion utility called InFanView . This utility allows you to select a batch of files (or directories) and rename them , resize them, crop them, recolor them, pretty much anything you would ever want to do to product images in bulk. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to manipulate your product images in bulk, you should definitely give InFanView a try. Istvan Siposs Y-Times

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...