If you are thinking about opening an ecommerce store, it would benefit you to check out yahoo stores. Yahoo is much respected in the ecommerce category and has world class services. Yahoo has a good thing going. Yahoo has the honor of being the number one shopping portal on the web. What does that mean to you? Well simply stated, think of Yahoo as a giant online mall. Inside the mall is a bunch of stores that sell everything from soup to nuts. Yahoo gives anyone the opportunity to have a storefront in their mall.

When you are part of the Yahoo family you reap some pretty good benefits. The largest advantage of this is from the Yahoo search engine. If you put the word computer into the search engine you will get a large return of companies that sell computers. This is no different than what Google would return to you.

However the big difference is that Yahoo will showcase any storefront similar with the keyword that you are requesting at the top of the list. If you look at Yahoo's search engine you will notice that when you get the keyword matches, the storefronts are always on top and in a shaded portion. This gets your attention immediately. Why does Yahoo do this for you? Well because when you sell something through your storefront, Yahoo takes a little piece of the pie.

Another huge benefit or advantage is the Yahoo store backend. If you were to develop your own website you would need a backend that is powerful and keeps you organized. Yahoo has built a platform that helps your website to be consistent and helps you process orders in an organized manner. They also have several tools already in place for promotion. If this is your first store, this can be a tremendous advantage since it takes the guess work out of ecommerce.

Yahoo gives you the opportunity to have the whole package through their website. You can set up a storefront for about $40 dollars a month and they give you all the additional tools you need to get it up and running. They also give you 30 days to develop the storefront and tweak it before officially launching it.

Keep in mind they do offer merchant accounts so that you can take credit card payments. They include the shopping cart built into your store system, so you do not have to worry about buying or subscribing to separate software. The shopping cart is built into the back end of the storefront and is fairly easy to use. There are several good courses and scores of good books to help you along the way.

One of the best parts about the yahoo storefront system is that help is only a phone call away. This is piece of mind that is worth paying for. If you are stuck with setting up your shipping or you have a question, you can call them and get those questions answered. I have found that it was never very hard to get through and the wait time was minimal.

Keeping track of orders may not seem like that big of a deal in the beginning of your ecommerce adventure. After things start to take off, it maybe a little more challenging. In the back end of the store you can see all of your orders and when you insert the tracking number into that order, it automatically emails your customer to tell them the shipment is on the way. Most shopping systems have this feature, but it is a nice addition and worthy of mention. Yahoo takes it a step further and gives you enough fields to add extra information about your customer's transaction. They also take the purchases and include it in your monthly and yearly sales reports. This shows you what products are selling and their respective quantities.

One of the options you have when starting a store is designing a store template that looks professional and inviting. Unfortunately the templates that Yahoo provides are mediocre. Your best bang for the buck is to hire someone that can custom design a store template for you. These companies know Yahoo's language and can design a storefront in a fraction of the time that you could. They also will give you a design that is both professional and impressive. A typical storefront with some great features goes anywhere from $1500 to $4000 on average. I find that spending the money for design is worth it since it frees you up to do many other things like promotion for example. Let the pros handle your design and you will be glad you did. Trying to do everything yourself is not good time management. You will find that the further along your storefront comes, the more taxing time management becomes.