Yahoo Shopping Optimization (aka Yahoo Product Submit)

Yahoo Shopping is one engine that has made a number of changes this year, most notably instituting category level bidding. Yahoo Shopping is still lagging far behind its status of a few years ago, when it was known as one of the top 3 channels, but Yahoo still packs a punch.

Key CSE Features

Category level bidding…hooray! For a long time merchants were handcuffed by not having many levers to pull in trying to increase traffic. Since search relevancy was based almost entirely on keyword content and past history, it could take a long time for new products and new merchants to gain clicks or sales. Now, Yahoo offers the ability to set bids by category in the Yahoo UI. As good competitive intelligence, Yahoo will also show what the top 5 bids are within each category. This gives a good sense a of how bids should be placed.

Support is also great for Yahoo. Yahoo is one of only a few channels that offer phone support for immediate concerns. Any merchant who has panicked because something is seriously wrong with listings during busy season should be able to appreciate this option.

Potential Hurdles

One potential hurdle is watching out for Yahoo featuring a product on it’s Yahoo Shopping homepage or on other areas of it’s ad network. The product will be featured for a 24 hour period, and the merchant has no advance notice of this. In my experience, a merchant can expect a huge surge of traffic during this time (perhaps 10 times or more than regular amounts). This can create havoc with tight budgets,and usually ROI is not as good. Currently, there is no way to turn this off, or opt out of being featured.

Another possible issue comes with images. Earlier in 2008, I saw several instances where Yahoo retained old images for products. I have not seen this happen recently with Yahoo, but if a merchant sees old images displaying, call into support and ask for a full image refresh. This will fix the issue as Yahoo will flush out all previously saved images and pull directly from current image locations provided in the most recent feed.

Hope this helps, and next post is the ‘monster’ of CSEs: Shopzilla

October 8th, 2008