Yahoo Shopping Cart Review: Early on in its history, Yahoo!® was known for its search engine, but it has expanded into web services. This article reviews its small business merchant plans. Keep reading for more on Yahoo's Shopping Cart features.

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Features of All Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant Plans

Some features are shared in common by all Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant plans.

• Store Design

With any Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant® plan, you gain access to a wizard to help your store design. Base your store on an existing template, develop your site using third-party tools (for instance, Adobe® Dreamweaver® - there's a special Yahoo!® extension - or Adobe® GoLive® or Microsoft® FrontPage®), or use a developer from Yahoo!'s® Developer Network.

All of the plans allow you to offer up to 50,000 products, including both physical products and downloads.  Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant plans provide tools for you to easily add products and upload product information from a spreadsheet or a product database that you've already created. Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant will track your inventory and give you reorder alerts. All plans have a $50 set up fee.

• Store Security

Your store can be set-up with password protection if you have an exclusive clientele, and SSL (Secure Socket Layer) with 128-bit encryption is used to transmit customer information. Data center security is also taken safely, and your site management system allows you to control which aspects of your store's data various employees can access.

• Shopping Cart

The Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant shopping carts allow shipping fees and taxes, as well as discounts, to be automatically calculated and displayed in the shopping cart. You can offer gift wrapping and messages and save shopping carts if shoppers need to interrupt their session before completing a purchase transaction. You can choose between single-page and multi-page checkout processing and customize your checkout page to match the rest of your site.

• Selling

Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant plans make it easy to use affiliate programs. They provide you with a merchant account for credit card processing, and allow you to accept payment through PayPal Express Checkout, as well as by check, money order, purchase orders, and COD.

• Marketing

Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant plans allow you to market your store in a variety of ways, including:

• automatic submission to Yahoo! Search and Google
• $100 credit for new customers at Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Free basic Yahoo! Local listing and 30% off feature listings for 3 months
• $50 credit for customers new to Google AdWords
• Free 90-day trial for new customers on Shopping.com ($50 value)
• $50 credit with Next Tag
• 1 month ($50) in free traffic from Shopzilla
• 1 month trial of Campaigner by GOT if you sign up

In addition, you can use the Yahoo! Keyword Generator, create emails to market your site, and use the Yahoo! Sales and Marketing Education Center.

What's Different About the Three Yahoo!® Small Business Merchant  Plans?

The three plan options are mainly distinguished by the amount of sales they were made to handle some of the features they offer, and, as a result, their cost.

The Starter Plan is recommended for merchants who expect sales of less than $18.000/month. It does not include cross-selling, gift certificates, real-time integration, fax notification of new orders, export of orders to UPS, or Yahoo! Web Analytics. The monthly cost for the plan is $39.95 and the transaction fee is 1.5%.

The Standard Plan is recommended for merchants who expect sales of  between $18.000/month and $68,000/month.  It includes cross-selling, gift certificates, real-time integration, fax notification of new orders, export of orders to UPS, and Yahoo! Web Analytics. The monthly cost for the plan is $129.95 and the transaction fee is 1.0%.

The Professional Plan is recommended for merchants who expect sales of more than $68,000/month.  It includes cross-selling, gift certificates, real-time integration, fax notification of new orders, export of orders to UPS, and Yahoo! Web Analytics. The monthly cost for the plan is $299.95 and the transaction fee is 0.75%.

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