The Yahoo Stores brand has been around for a long time, but on Thursday, Yahoo introduced the new Yahoo Stores, which it says will let people turn their ideas into businesses in less than two minutes.
Are you interested in using the new Yahoo Stores to sell online? Do you expect it to be a successful platform? Share your thoughts in the comments.
“This launch is the culmination of the small business team’s 16-year history and takes the best of everything they’ve learned from their million+ customers.,” a Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews .
“For most retailers, an online store is crucial, but getting it started is an arduous task that can take weeks,” says Yahoo Small Business head Amit Kumar. “With Yahoo Stores, you can have an online store up-and-running and accepting orders in less than a couple of minutes. Our platform offers a seamless payment processing experience that is automatically PCI compliant, connecting you directly with a payment service provider in just a few clicks.”
Yahoo Stores gives businesses payment processing that’s automatically PCI complaint, connecting them directly with a payment service provider. It also includes “automatic SEO.”
“From day one, stores will have the same serving technology used on Yahoo.com, including relevant keywords in your website URLs, concise descriptions of a website’s content and more,” the spokesperson says.
It also offers new responsive storefront designs, themes, and style guides.
The offering also comes with live web insights fro mobile. Check it all out here.
Kumar appeared on Bloomberg TV to talk about the offering, noting that Yahoo Small Business already has over a million and a half small business customers and has processed over 65 billion dollars in e-commerce transactions.
The emphasis with the new Yahoo Stores is to simplify the flow for people who have never sold online, he said.
On what’s changed, he said, “It’s a mobile-first economy and heading towards it, and we want to be ready for it, [and] help our e-commerce merchants be ready for it. We understand how more and more people want to sell their wares, you know, handcrafted items, online, so we want to help them, but most importantly, we want to give our small businesses the same kind of tools that you would get in the offline world, so our small businesses will now be able to see people come into their store online, be able to interact with them, talk with them, [and] make sales.”
It also comes with services for growing businesses like advertising from Yahoo as well as products from Google, Facebook, and Amazon all built into one system.
As Bloomberg notes, Etsy did $1.35 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2013. Shopify did $1.68 billion. Yahoo is criticized for taking too long with its ecommerce revamp, as some of this money could have went Yahoo’s way.
Kumar responds, “When someone is starting their entrepreneurial journey, they might in fact start with an Etsy or even Amazon Marketplace for that matter, but you know, there comes a time when the association that you have as the buyer from these marketplaces is with the marketplace – not with the small business themselves. You mention Etsy, but you’d be hard pressed to name a specific seller in Etsy that you work with or you interact with or you love. That’s what we give. We are really the graduation ceremony.”
He also said Yahoo had the most stable platform on CyberMonday last year.
On the SEO promises, it’s worth noting, he said it’s not just on Yahoo’s search engine, but also on Google and Bing. He said their customers are not just Yahoo customers.
What do you think? Would you consider giving it a shot? Let us know in the comments.
Images via Yahoo