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...

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.