Moving from Yahoo Stores

Moving from Yahoo Stores
Free Yourself for The Revenue Sharing Price Structure.

The revenue sharing pricing model for hosted ecommerce solutions is on the way out. Why should merchants have to pay a monthly fee and a percentage of all sales to both their hosting provider and merchant account? They don’t and shouldn’t. Yahoo Stores pioneered this payment structure (while they were pioneering the hosted shopping cart industry) and over 150,000 online merchants continue to share a percentage of their revenue with Yahoo Stores.

Years ago, there wasn’t a hosted shopping cart solution that could compare to Yahoo Stores. This solution offered a low barrier of web/tech skills of launch an online store and once opened, the feature set offered was robust. The markup language used was gobbled up my search engines and Yahoo Stores could rank well with little SEO effort (still true today). The payment system is integrated into the cart so the merchant can process refunds right through the Yahoo Store admin panel. Also integrated into the admin panel was UPS shipping tools. For many years, Yahoo Stores was without rival. That has since changed.

Start up hosted shopping cart companies we created just to catch the crumbs Yahoo Stores sweeps from its table. With over 150,000 stores, these crumbs are considerable. Enter MonsterCommerce. When Monster was young, they offered a innovative hosted cart without a revenue sharing pricing model. This alone caused many a disgruntled Yahoo store owner to switch to MonsterCommerce. Yahoo Stores still had MonsterCommerce beat in terms of features though (and still does by my estimation). So a merchant that escaped the Yahoo pricing structure would have to accept a lesser solution, in terms of features and merchant tools.

Enter Volusion. This company was started by former Dell employees and their sights were set on Yahoo Store owners that either outgrew the solution or were tired of the pricing structure. Volusion provided many of the features and merchant tools that Yahoo Store owners grew to know and love. Volusion then took off like a rocket. Volusion is still snatching up market share and for good reason. Their solution is rock solid, feature rich and incredibly powerful.

Other hosted shopping carts are realizing what appeals to merchants, e.g., lots of features, great SEO ability and a flat monthly fee. Many of these other cart solutions can compete neck and neck with Yahoo Stores. Take a look a 3dCart or InstanteStore for instance.

With all the viable options on the market today, a merchant need not share their revenue with their shopping cart provider. Other providers are happy to offer you a store with as many or more features than Yahoo Stores for a flat monthly rate.