A quick note about YStore - Pros and Cons
There are 2 ways to get a online store quickly. Either get a software product such as CRE Loaded or OScommerce, and host your website on your own domain or get a store using a hosted service such as the Ystore by Yahoo. In recent days, YStore has risen in popularity, for a few reasons.
- YStore is hosted and services/software, Etc. are managed by Yahoo. Even for tech-savvy webmasters, managing regular security upgrades on the software is a challenge. Additional modules and third party components are great, often free, but ensuring that they work well with your site is really left up to you. And then when the site gets hacked (which does happen to regular sites, trust me!) bringing the site back up is perhaps the craziest time you’ll spend behind a computer. Leaving that up to the experts is often a good idea in the long run. Ystore is a very reasonably priced hosted solution considering that it’s backed by the world’s #2 Internet company.
- Creating products is a piece of cake with Ystore. Most fields can be entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded into the site. Images can be uplaoded easily as well.
- Ystore comes with a whole bunch of features for promoting your products online, analyzing sales, search keyword data, Etc. This is a useful thing to have from a single dashboard. As against other offerings where you will need to usually deal with a separate product or third party for many of those features.
- Optimizing Ystore for search engines is simple. You don’t even need to know HTML. Just log into Store Editor, edit each page, enter the Page title and meta tags into their fields, that’s it. Now, to know what to enter into those fields needs some knowledge of SEO concepts and keyword research. But a good SEO company should be able to do that for you.
Now, not everything is that perfect about the Ystore and you should know that before you jump in.
Ystore makes YStore for novice store owners. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. For instance, it’s not easy to change the URL of a page once you enter it once. According to several sources, changing product URL’s requires changing the product ID and a re-upload of the catalog, which can end up breaking the existing incoming links to the site. To my knowledge, URL redirects for Ystore URL’s is not easy either. We are still researching some of these issues, but as we do that, we are realizing that there is not enough information about Ystore SEO on the Internet. There are several companies that will do it for you, but charge heavily. Yahoo’s help section is not too useful. The help results include items from Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo Merchant Solutions and other sites, so finding the aritlce that applies to the Ystore can get challenging sometimes.
Overall, Ystore is a great offering. Our recommendation is that if you are planning to create a store using Ystore, consult with a reliable online marketing company about SEO upfront. Doing that upfront is much easier.
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