# Yahoo Store Help!



## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

Hey Folks....I need some help with my new Yahoo Store.

I just started this site about 1 month ago and now absolutely nothing about e-comerce or coding. Which is why I chose to use Yahoo Merchant Solutions.

It is not the best I'm sure but it is actually better and more functional than what I got from some guy I paid $1000 to for our last site!!  

Anyway my problem is that I've gotten about 1800 visits in the past 3 or 4 weeks with 1300 of those coming in the last 10 days. Also, I've been playing with some basic SEO based on what I've been reading in one of those "Dummies" books on SEO and Yahoo Stores. Actually, if you search for the products in my store I end up on the 1st page on both Google and Yahoo which I am very surprised with but happy too.  

However...with all that said....I've not yet sold one product!!  

I went through and purchased something off the site to make sure all was working well and it went through without a hitch.

Are my expectations too high or is there something possibly preventing people from ordering from my site?

Please feel free to visit my site below and let me know what you think. The custom and personalized product pages are still under development so they are a bit rough right now but wanted to get something up about those services for the time being.

Thanks!!

John


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## Catbox (Oct 3, 2007)

The site looks cool... not sure why sales are slow?

How are you promoting it... word of mouth etc?

One thing I might do is put the designs on a tshirt blank...
and maybe make a more uniform header(banner) on the website... 
only 1 or 2 font types and simpler...
not sure if that would help sales but it would look cool...lol


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

Catbox said:


> The site looks cool... not sure why sales are slow?
> 
> How are you promoting it... word of mouth etc?
> 
> ...


Hey Catbox..thanks for the reply.

Haven't really promoted it yet per say. I put it in my signature here (mostly for folks to check out what we do) but haven't even put it out on biz cards yet. We just added it to our radio spot but it won't run until Monday.

So it's early I realize but just wondering if this is the type of conversion to expect or if something is preventing people from ordering.

John


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## Catbox (Oct 3, 2007)

I have insomnia... so i made a banner... lol... Use if you want... I can even change it around... I have the .psd 









That is the hard part... figuring out how to get people to buy our shirts...
I would tell everyone you know and email people... see if you can get people to link to your site from their website... Do some charity stuff... and don't forget to tell everyone about your site again... haha


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

Hey Catbox...

Thanks!! LOL

I kinda like the look.... 

Yeah...I've read about the importance of getting links to the site..and that is something I'm trying to figure out. However, as I mentioned, it looks like I'm getting decent placement at the moment....by the Grace of God!!  

Yeah...I am planning on slapping it on everything we have...store window, car windows, radio ads, t-shirts, biz cards, etc. LOL


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## Gunslinger (Aug 3, 2007)

John,

Your expectations are too high. The main right now, is your timing. It's after Xmas (even I launched too close to the holidays, and was fortunate to grab a few sales) ... money has been spent, and it takes time for people to build up some spending $$$. Our current ecomony isn't helping matters, either. My experience goes about as far back as it gets for e-commerce on the net, and January typically sucks ... but it will pick back up in February (which with one past biz I had, ended up my best month ever at over $15,000 in gross sales ... but it took a year and a half to get there).

All the responses here, so far, are nice ideas to spread the word and grab more traffic ... but it won't help nail a sale. Basically, you are looking for the 3% rule of sales. Three out of a hundred visitors to buy something from you. For the internet, it gets trickier as even 1% can be a struggle ... if you get over 3%, it's gravy (and either you've got great products, or done your job marketing the web).

It takes time to build traffic, reputation, product lines, service ... 3-6 months, if you are working it regularly. Be patient, update as often as you can (give em a reason to come back), target your holidays with your products, utilize your meta tags (but don't abuse em) with the text on your pages. You are already active on some forums ... be active with other things you like online (anywhere you can drop your signature). Right now, just keep working the net and your site, watch your stats in Yahoo store control panel. For instance, compare your visitors to the number of clicks to your basket ... if you have a nice number of clicks, those are potential customers who just aren't ready to buy today (how many of us do that at our fav online store, like Amazon), but are simply saving something they might want to buy later.

I could go on and on, but I am sure others will chip in here.

John, please drop me an e-mail ... since we are both using some of the same tools, I can fill you in with some of the stuff I am doing (it would get too lengthy here, and might confuse others), and we can compare notes!


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

Gunslinger said:


> John,
> 
> Your expectations are too high. The main right now, is your timing. It's after Xmas (even I launched too close to the holidays, and was fortunate to grab a few sales) ... money has been spent, and it takes time for people to build up some spending $$$. Our current ecomony isn't helping matters, either. My experience goes about as far back as it gets for e-commerce on the net, and January typically sucks ... but it will pick back up in February (which with one past biz I had, ended up my best month ever at over $15,000 in gross sales ... but it took a year and a half to get there).
> 
> ...


Hey Michael....

Thanks for the great feedback!!

I will e-mail you directly...

John


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## txmxikn (Jan 16, 2007)

What about putting at least a few of the designs on the home page so folks have an idea of what type of shirts you sell.


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

txmxikn said:


> What about putting at least a few of the designs on the home page so folks have an idea of what type of shirts you sell.


Hey Chuy..thanks for the suggestion.

I've tought about that but then I've read where if you put pictures on a page, it causes the text to move further down the page which search engines don't like. Apparently, search engines rank keywords higher when they are farther up towards the top of the page.

Not sure how true this is or if I've perhaps misunderstood that info but that is why I've avoided putting pics on the homepage at the moment.


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## Catbox (Oct 3, 2007)

How do Search Engines Rank Web Sites


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

Catbox said:


> How do Search Engines Rank Web Sites


Hey..thanks Catbox. It said the same thing in that article about keywords towards the top of the page being considered more important.


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## skust (Jun 13, 2007)

I have a yahoo site and have found that pictures work and also targeting a specific niche helps. Putting those keywords on your page, for your niche, should help. You may not get as many hits but they will be more targeted. 

You can look at my site www.thespiritzone.com to see what I mean. I target schools, clubs etc. specifically. This is a yahoo store also.


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## Freedomwear (Jan 26, 2008)

Hi John, 

1800 hits in a matter of 3 weeks seems really good!! I also used Yahoo for my site, but haven't quite grasped the concept of how to do the whole online marketing, if you don't mind me asking: maybe you could share some ideas on what you did in terms of getting your ad in the search results?? 

Any help would be great!! I want to do whatever I can to advertise our site of course....but I am trying to stay on a pretty low budget when it comes to that right now. 

any help on how to get the link out there would be great! 

Thank you!


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

Freedomwear said:


> Hi John,
> 
> 1800 hits in a matter of 3 weeks seems really good!! I also used Yahoo for my site, but haven't quite grasped the concept of how to do the whole online marketing, if you don't mind me asking: maybe you could share some ideas on what you did in terms of getting your ad in the search results??
> 
> ...


Hey Freedom...

I bought a "dummies" book on Yahoo Stores and one on SEO and put alot of keyword rich content in my content, description, etc. boxes per the book recommendation. My biggest seller is a pretty narrow nich so that probably helped alot too. I also got a Google Adword account to give it a try and got myself posted pretty often as a sponsored site..right next to the company that makes them!! lol She isn't very happy...I can tell. Oh well....

Anyway..can't help much more than that....


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## Freedomwear (Jan 26, 2008)

Thank you for sharing John, I may have to look into getting the book for "dummies" on it....afterall, it seems to fit how I have been feeling about it! lol 

I appreciate your sharing...best of luck with your site!!


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

treadhead said:


> Hey Chuy..thanks for the suggestion.
> 
> I've tought about that but then I've read where if you put pictures on a page, it causes the text to move further down the page which search engines don't like. Apparently, search engines rank keywords higher when they are farther up towards the top of the page.
> 
> Not sure how true this is or if I've perhaps misunderstood that info but that is why I've avoided putting pics on the homepage at the moment.


Don't design for search engines.

Search engines won't pull out their credit card and buy on your site.

Design for people FIRST. They are the ones that will be pulling out their credit card to make purchases.

If you design for search engines, you'll get a site that shows up high, but won't convert and make a sale.

Design for people, and you'll get sales from the people that DO come to your site and they'll tell other PEOPLE, and those PEOPLE will buy more stuff.

Search engine rankings will come in time once you have the basic stuff down.

I wouldn't read any SEO book (most are out of date as soon as they are published and may lead you to make some bad decisions).

Go straight to the source and check out Google's guidelines for increasing your search engine rankings. That will give you the basics of what you need. It's linked to in several other threads here on SEO:

seo related topics at T-Shirt Forums


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