About a year ago I watched an excellent tutorial about putting together a yahoo store. I really wanted to step into the E-commerce marketplace and start selling some goods online. I decided to go with Yahoo because they have a very good reputation and take a lot of the headache of research away from the store building process. For example, buying a shopping cart, programming that cart and then trying to figure out most of their complexities is not an issue with the yahoo store front system. The cart is built in and you do not have to buy one nor spend an additional monthly expense. I like simple and this was a huge head start.

The biggest answer about the yahoo system came to me when I was talking to Tech support one day. The key to building a E-commerce store at yahoo is knowing that there are two ways of doing it. This was not made very clear or perhaps my denseness did not pick it up right away. You can build a yahoo store using the templates in the yahoo system and have a straight forward store system. You can also build the store and then go back and use Yahoo site builder to build a regular website with a store feature. The store feature then becomes the backend management system for your website and it allows you to manage your inventory. So what does this mean? Well I wanted to put a lot of content on my site as well as sell products. By having a huge content system, I build up authority in the eyes of Google. So I built a site that had a big article section, a directions section as well as a linking section and all the other goodies you want. I wanted the ability to have some multimedia and do some testing and experimenting with some unique content that you cannot do with a straight up storefront.

So here is what I did. I set up my Yahoo store first. I wrote out all the sections and then the items that went into each section and categorized them. I uploaded all my product pictures and text into the storefront. I did not deviate from the standard template nor did I customize the look of my store since it will not be seen by the customer. I basically just programmed all the product codes. Then I fired up Site Builder and built the site. I took the time to make the homepage look great and link all the pages in the ways that I want them to link. I added my content pages and made sure the site was tagged and optimized for my key words. Then when I was finished I went back to the yahoo store editor and copied the ?order button? html code for each product and inserted it into its appropriate page. This order button is how the site is connected to the store. Now the customer can order the products you carry and still have the benefit of a website that has lots of contents and a good FAQ section.

You don't have to use site builder to build your site. If you like Frontpage or Dream weaver those programs work well too. The key is just insert the html code from the products into your site. This is really where the light came on for me.