Yahoo Upgrades Merchant Shopping Cart

In an effort to make the checkout process more streamlined and customizable, Yahoo Wednesday unveiled a beta version of its enhanced shopping cart for customers using Yahoo! Merchant Solutions e-commerce hosting. Meanwhile, Yahoo's merchant hosting continues to grow at a rapid pace.

The beta shopping cart is available to all merchants for testing through the end of September, according to Jimmy Duvall, director of Yahoo's e-commerce products.

The new checkout manager enables merchants to configure each page of the checkout process to be more consistent. Merchants will also have the capability of offering a single-page checkout form that captures all information on a single page allowing for a streamlined checkout process.

In an interview with ECommerce-Guide.com, Duvall said Yahoo is focusing on improving three areas for its customers: extending branding capabilities, building a more flexible checkout process flow and delivering greater customization of the buyer experience.

In terms of branding, merchants now have the ability to customize the visual design of a store's checkout pages to ensure a consistent look and feel throughout the merchant's site, as well as prominent branding. Merchants can now control the font, colors, button appearance, and the content displayed in designated navigation areas across the site, from initial browsing to the checkout pages.

Yahoo's new Checkout Manager for Merchant Solutions enables merchants to fully customize and streamline the checkout process for Yahoo-hosted stores.

Merchants also gain more flexibility because they have more control over checkout page content and fields so they can collect information unique to their businesses, control how and where fields are displayed, and provide consumers with better help resources to facilitate their purchase.

"This is revolutionary because merchants can now add single-page checkout now. With the old version, the checkout process was all about simplicity and getting the job done. With the new version, we've added order review and you can choose between single or multi-page flows. In the past, this wasn't an option or you'd have to hire a developer to program the site," he said regarding merchants control over the ordering flow.

Duvall also noted that the shipping calculator included in the new checkout manager enables merchants to show the total shipping cost calculations on a buyer's shopping cart page, rather than the shopper discovering that cost later in the process. Tax and coupon calculators can also be added to that page.

"Buyers want to know what they're going to be charged before they buy," he said.

As part of the new design process, merchants also have access to custom CSS style sheets to further customize each checkout page. Duvall said the style sheet can be downloaded, modified by a site's designer and uploaded back to Yahoo. The style sheet controls elements such as colors, fonts, checkout flow process indicators and images.

Yahoo Merchant Solutions customers will now see a "Checkout Manager (Beta)" link located in their store manager control panels. For the time being, merchants can test the control panel independently of their stores. Duvall said Yahoo is giving merchants the option of using the old or new checkout format moving forward, but the company wants to make sure users are comfortable with the new format before rolling it out on the live sites.

Still Growing
In addition to the new Checkout Manager, Yahoo is also quietly touting a new milestone for its Merchant Solutions division. During ECommerce-Guide.com's interview with Duvall, it was noticed that Yahoo now claimed it hosts more than 35,000 online stores - 5,000 more than in April of this year. That would translate into a nearly 50 percent annual growth rate. While Duvall could not comment on month-to-month growth for Yahoo's Merchant Solutions, he acknowledged the new threshold and said the numbers could be deduced from looking at the numbers.

For more information: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce Guide.com.