Other community contributions/hacks help you sort out nice URLs across the site to auto-generated sitemaps and pricelists. We’ve written quite a few custom mods ourselves but if you search around on the site you can get a very long way towards the ‘perfect shop’

I couldn’t resist posting here about this subject as someone that continously researches e-commerece solutions.

Yahoo stores are very SE friendly, but the fees charged by Yahoo can be annoying, especially when you factor in merchant account fees on top of it. THE best shopping cart as far as bang for buck is our custom solution that we have developed on top of an off the shelf $99 application. If anyone’s looking to just modify their own to suit, go to ecommercetemplates.com and the buy the fresh install. They offer both ASP and PHP versions (no, i don’t receive any compensation for recommending them).

Jim, you know from our previous discussions that our product pages are well-optimized. We’ve done over 7 million in online sales alone with this shopping cart and never had an issue.

If anyone is interested in the “hands off” approach and want someone else to setup/optimize your store, please use the contact form on my site.

I’ve also had some ups and downs with ecommerce developers. They seem to get worse on timliness lately when supporting or fixing what they sold us…

Anyhow, take a look at SunShop. Very easy to use that someone with even basic knowledge of HTML can handle it - and the URLs are pretty search engine friendly.

They also offer a host of payment processors that are supported. Take a look at their FAQs for more common questions.

Have a great day!

Also the e one group - http://www.eonegroup.com

The portability issue is a real one, I agree. See my comment above for a summary of that issue.

In terms of “custom programming and internal SEO-related features,” both are available on the Yahoo Store platform.

Believe me, I completely understand why people who really haven’t spent serious time investigating Yahoo’s solution would question it. It’s not right for everyone. If you’re a somewhat larger e-commerce company with goals of doing $50 million in annual sales, it probably isn’t right. If you aspire to do up to $5 million in annual sales, and want to make an investment commensurate with that goal, it is worth consideration. I’ve seen plenty make it there.

I’ve always been a fan of getting the SEOs involved right from the beginning–even as the site is being built and perhaps before it’s even conceived.

In the future, I see the ideal situation as being one where the SEO works directly with the graphic designers and the web developers on a site, and that’s exactly why I joined MarketNet recently–a one stop shop for SEO, Web Design, and Web Development.

I completely understand why someone would want to set up a Yahoo! Store–especially if they’re a small business. But, I don’t see the Yahoo! Stores being a viable solution to someone who wants to have a large ecommerce site with lots of products–typically there’s a need for custom programming and internal SEO-related “features” of the site that wouldn’t necessarily be available via a Yahoo! Store.

I understand, too, that plenty of small business have used them to their advantage–they’ve had a huge cost savings and have been able to scale their operations. But what happens when they need to move the site? Or what if a company is already using another ecommerce solution? Going to a one-stop web design/web programming/SEO firm might be a better option.

I’m glad I’ve lessened your disregard for the medium That said, my response may further hasten your disregard…

You’ve hit upon one of the bigger downsides of Yahoo Stores, in that they are not really portable. You can’t simply tar the site up and move it to a new web host. Regardless of how it may be spun, you’re really not paying Yahoo for hosting your e-commerce store; you’re really paying them for the platform. So moving away from Yahoo Store would be like selecting new e-commerce software and rebuilding your website. I think they may be moving away from this, but that is how it is now.

I’ve known sites that have moved off Yahoo Store once they reached a certain level of sales, but despite rumblings here and there, businesses usually grow to like the platform once they’re on it. A number of third-party solutions are emerging to optimize order processing and reduce reliance on actually using the Yahoo manager interface. Further, the small business team at Yahoo has really done a great job of supporting the platform.

I happen to think the platform is an excellent value for many small businesses. I’ve seen a number of small businesses scale from $0 in annual sales, to millions in annual sales. That said, the tradeoffs are real.

Some quick benefits:

- Static pages
- Fairly scalable platform
- Well supported by many developers
- Almost non-existent downtime
- Huge cost savings
- 24×7 tech support (free)