Setting Up a Yahoo Store

Ok, I’ve been working almost all day on setting up a Yahoo Store for DCShoesClothing.com and the first thing I have to say is that it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be.

Ok, the first thing I discovered that was unexpected is that Yahoo’s ecommerce technology does not provide you with a dynamic site. There’s a real difference between a static site and a database driven site, and in the case of Yahoo if you want a database driven site it’s up to you to build it. They do offer PHP/MySQL support for doing this.

But guess what? Yahoo’s store works by providing you with special tags to include in your HTML, and it just so happens that they don’t work on pages with a .php extension. Oh, and guess what else? You can’t parse .html files as php. So basically, you can only use php on pages of your site that don’t have any content on them that needs to be pulled from the Yahoo store…and the only pages that fit that description are the…static pages like “about us” and such, for which you don’t really need php.

In other words, they give you PHP/MySQL support and then they take it away from you.

Next, you can’t customize the look and feel of the checkout process. Someone picks a shoe they like, then they click on “buy now” and all of a sudden you’re taken to this ugly page. Yahoo gives you some options for changing the look of it, but they’re all ugly, and none of them fits within the framework of the site you’ve designed. That and figuring out how to manage the various features of the checkout process are impossible to figure out. I guarantee you there’s a computer programmer somewhere to whom this all makes sense, and whenever he hears that it doesn’t make sense to someone else he figures it must be user error. But trust me, I’ve done enough programming that I should be able to understand a user interface if it’s designed correctly, and this one makes little sense. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for someone who’s not technically inclined to use this stuff.

The gist of it all is that a Yahoo! Store is not easy to set up, and not easy to use, even for somebody with technical skills. I believe that in my case it will be a very temporary situation. As soon as I have enough cash in hand to pay my web design firm to build something I’m going to create a custom solution.

If you’ve been thinking of setting up a Yahoo store yourself, I’d think twice. Everything appears easy when you’re signing up, but it’s another beast once you get inside it.