It all started when I accidentally deleted our entire product catalog.
Try for a moment to imagine the panic that gripped me, a fledgling webmaster only a few months into her new awesome job, as I realized what I had done. Heart racing. Palms sweating. The barely controllable urge to flee and hide in a dark corner somewhere.
See, about 5 years ago, I helped move our e-commerce store from the Miva Merchant platform to Yahoo Merchant Solutions. I barely knew basic HTML, and Yahoo lured us in with their supposedly newbie-friendly Store Builder. Switching platforms was a pain in the ass (some things never change), but our e-commerce future seemed promising.
And then I nuked the whole site.
We spent the next several hours on the phone with Yahoo’s euphemistically named customer support reps. If you’ve never had to call Yahoo for support, here’s the basic routine:
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Dial the number. Wait … wait … wait …
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Hooray! You’ve reached a rep! Time to verify your security info.
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Spend the next 20 minutes verifying security info repeatedly to someone who speaks broken English.
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Success! You get to explain your problem!
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Transferred to another rep. You lose a turn.
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Verify your security info again. Hey, a terrorist could have taken the phone away from you mid-call.
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Be LIED to. (“No, sorry, we don’t keep any backups of your store.”)
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Freak out. Hang up.
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Do some research on the internet. Discover that Yahoo DOES keep backups. Super-secret ones.
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Call Yahoo back. Repeat steps 1 through 8 until they let you speak to a manager.
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Manager admits they keep backups and grudgingly agrees to restore your site “just this once.”
And so the seed of my hatred for Yahoo was planted.
After several experiences with Yahoo support, I learned that it’s much faster and less crazy-making to just figure it out yourself, ask someone else or accept the problem and move on. I also learned that creating our website in Yahoo’s Store Builder was the worst idea ever.
If you’re thinking about using Yahoo’s Store Builder, consider the following fundamental flaws:
- You can’t access your .htaccess file. Forget about 301 redirects. If a product is discontinued or you have to rename the page, wave goodbye to all your link juice.
- You can’t edit your robots.txt file, so you can’t block the search engines from sensitive areas of your website. But that’s OK, Yahoo already decided for you what should be blocked.
- You can’t access your database. A limited amount of information can be imported and exported through the Catalog Manager. Oh, but you’re not really supposed to use the Store Builder and the Catalog Manager together. (This is how I accidentally deleted everything.)
- All of your URLs are on a subdomain (store.yourwebsite.com). You can redirect these to www.yourwebsite.com, but that will introduce a whole slew of new problems, like the inability to upload a sitemap file to your root folder (which is now named site.yourwebsite.com).
- Yahoo creates Store Editor pages using a proprietary programming language called RTML. If you don’t want your store to look like every other Yahoo store out there, you’ll have to learn RTML … but Yahoo won’t provide any support or even a basic manual. You have to rely on third-party ebooks to even begin to understand it.
As far as I’m concerned, these five issues alone are deal-breakers. That’s why one of my final decisions at this job was to migrate the whole shebang over to the upstart Magento e-commerce platform.
Do you have any Yahoo horror stories to share? Please leave a comment!
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I think you’ll find the same type problems with just about any “site/store builders” – I sure had my fair share of this in the beginning.
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Great write-up, very interested as a friend is investigating hosted ecommerce stores at the moment.
I’ll be interested if you could write a follow up, “Why You Should Choose Yahoo’s Store Builder”
Cheers,
Alastair.
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Ha! You’d have to force me at gunpoint. I will most likely write about my experience with the Magento project, though.
Thanks Adrienne,
Great tips. You saved me from making a big mistake with Yahoo.
-Linda
Yes this was an epic mistake. I found out later that yahoo bought the store platform from another company, and from that point forward didn’t lift a finger to update it or provide any real documentation. Its got a very 1990’s feel to it.
BTW, your blog looks very good on the Blackberry. I’m using viigo to read it, the posts all come through with images included.
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Hey, Sean! It’s great to see you here.
Knowing what I know now (with my crystal-clear 20/20 hindsight), I do wish we had gone with something like osCommerce. I spent way too much time learning how to code RTML when I could have been focusing more on PHP and CSS.
Oh well, at least I got to write a fun rant about it.
I just took over a store that’s hosted on yahoo. The limitations are immensely frustrating. I’ll add a few other problems to the list:
1. You have no manual control over your xml product feed to search engines. So if I you want a special “add to cart” price on an item with a minimum advertised price, you can’t manually make sure the MAP still gets sent to Froogle and other price comparison engines. If you still want to offer the sale price, you’ll have to disable your entire feed to make sure you don’t violate minimum advertised price guidelines. Yay!
2. No shipping rules. I’d like to offer $4.95 flat rate priority shipping on the items that qualify, but there’s no way to set shipping options per item.
3. No real-time quotes from FedEx or USPS. Yes, there are companies out there that offer add-ons which add this functionality, but not for merchant starter accounts. And I could throw something together with the APIs, but as best I can tell, there’s no control at all over the content of the shopping cart… hence no way to ensure the shipping cost gets properly passed through checkout.
4. The Web Domain statistics are an abomination. I don’t ask for too much really. My other sites are hosted by lunarpages, and it’s not like they give you an overabundance of statistics. But I’d at least like a legible presentation of who’s been to my site lately and what they’ve looked at. The logs are hard to read, and the actual statistics section of the control panel is embarrassing.
5. Just to reiterate, the store.domain.com subdomain thing SUCKS (store.domain.com shows up as a result for my storename on Google, and I DO NOT want people going there). And the inability to remedy the issue with an .htaccess file also sucks. Those things were just worth mentioning again.
On the other hand, Yahoo does at least have a few things going for it. The coupon manager is better than implementations in a few of the other shopping carts. Actually, I think that’s the only positive I’ve got. I’d like to move the store over to Lunarpages and find a standalone shopping cart. Any suggestions?
Nice rant, Eric! I had completely forgotten about the shipping issues because we did most of our business by phone, and at some point we just gave up trying to charge shipping properly on the web. We calculated shipping after the order was placed (which sucks).
Right now, the only shopping cart I will even consider is Magento. It’s not perfect, but straight out of the box it is leaps and bounds better than any other shopping cart I’ve tried.
Are you using Magento Enterprise? Or Community? I’m looking at the community demo but I don’t see anything about shipping integration or payment gateways. In fact, the documentation for the Magento back-end seems to be pretty sparse all around.
I used the Community version, as the Enterprise version hadn’t been released yet.
And yes, unfortunately the free documentation for Magento is pretty bad. I just jumped in and figured it out on my own, with some help from other users in the forums and the firm we hired for the redesign. They just released a paid user guide, but I haven’t read it yet.
Hey again. Just want to suggest CS-Cart as a potential option for other people who see this. I just downloaded and installed the free 60-day trial, and so far it seems light years beyond anything else I’ve tried. The Admin Backend is loaded with options but still easy to navigate/edit. But the real winning feature for me is an integrated WYSIWYG editor for the storefront which basically works like firebug except less buggy and it interacts directly with your server. It’s pretty amazing. Click on a block, a list of files displays beside it. Highlight a file, and the part of the block it controls is highlighted. Click on the file and a real-time code editor opens directly on the page with a file tree in a column on the left. Seriously, I’m blown away by CS-Cart.
Hey, thanks for the follow-up, Eric. I will definitely have to check that one out.
Hey guy’s thanks for the tips on Yahoo store, what would you recommend to someone that is just starting setting up an online store. Since Yahoo has those disadvantages I wanted to look at other options. Please let me know.
Thank you!
At this point, I haven’t seen anything better than Magento. Just keep in mind that I’m not spending my days testing various e-commerce platforms, so I can’t say with 100% certainty that Magento is the best for everyone in every situation. However, I have strongly considered setting up an e-commerce site using Wordpress and a plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/).
Yeah, Yahoo stores are really bad. I built a store for my mom in Yahoo store builder (I had no clue what I was doing), spent weeks on it and finally made it look reasonable. But now everytime I want something like google analytics or google base submit, or new sitemap features, I have to pay someone for a $200 module. And when google product submit gets screwed up, you are SOL.
I started a second store in Zen Cart. I spent 2 days uploading modules and learning the code structure. After that I paid someone $100 to make the site look good, and everything has been groovy since. Definitely recommend zencart or osCommerce to anyone starting out.
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