Yahoo! frequently releases updates to its Yahoo! Store platform. Many are just fixes or minor updates that most store owners won’t notice or are updates designed to assist the developer community.
However, this week a few updates were made that caught my attention so I thought I’d take a few minutes to point them out to you.
The first is a welcome addition that I’m sure many store owners will be happy about. Let’s say you decided that you are no longer going to carry the Scott’s Widgets brand of Stainless Steel Widgets & Accessories. All of a sudden, you need to delete 350 items associated with that brand. Prior to today, that could be a long and drawn out process.
Thanks to the new Bulk Delete Tool, sending those 350 items to the trash bin can be done by simply uploading a TXT or CSV file. Talk about a time saver! Learn more about how to use the Bulk Delete Tool by clicking here.
The second update solves a problem many store owners face – weird item page ID names. You know what I’m talking about. The name an item or page is given when you create it in the Store Editor. By default Yahoo! Store takes the first few characters of your item name and creates an ID name from it.
For example, if your widget store carried an item called Scott’s Expandable Chrome Widget, Yahoo! would create an ID for that item that looked something like this: “scexchwi.” The URL of the page that called that item up would be https://www.yourstore.com/scexchwi.html.
Now, thanks to the Change Item ID Tool you are able to change that ID into something more SEO friendly, such as “scotts-expandable-chrome-widget.” One thing to note here, when you change a page or item ID, the original page will be gone, so you will need to also do a 301 redirect for the old page so if it’s linked or indexed with the search engines, you will still receive traffic for that page.
Like the Bulk Update Tool, changing IDs are done via a TXT or CSV file upload. You can learn how to use this feature by clicking here. For instructions on how to do 301 redirects, click here. Please, don’t forget to do the redirect if you’re changing IDs!
As more updates are released for the Yahoo! Store platform, I’ll be sure to keep you updated on ones that I feel are important enough to share.
Happy selling!
Scott Sanfilippo
General Manager, YSW
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.