Comments on: Why You Should Avoid Yahoo’s Store Builder

By: TJ

TJ — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:36:30 +0000

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.

By: Adrienne Doss

Adrienne Doss — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:51:46 +0000

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/).

By: Federico

Federico — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:35:08 +0000

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!

By: Adrienne Doss

Adrienne Doss — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:52:18 +0000

Hey, thanks for the follow-up, Eric. I will definitely have to check that one out.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:53:35 +0000

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.

By: Adrienne Doss

Adrienne Doss — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:02:26 +0000

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.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:52:52 +0000

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.

By: Adrienne Doss

Adrienne Doss — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:17:39 +0000

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.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:21:23 +0000

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?

By: Adrienne Doss

Adrienne Doss — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:32:21 +0000

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.