Here is the summary of the vendors that were at the Yahoo summit 2010 in Santa Clara.
It was really nice to see many friendly familiar faces on the merchant store owner side, the Yahoo account managers and product team, as well as the Yahoo web developers.
In case you’re curious which vendors were present, here are the ones that I got a chance to speak to about what they’re working on for Yahoo Stores.
This what they had to share:
My Store Solutions – Ian Torrey said that his team has been working on a feature that delivers a intuitive toolset to customers based on how they browse your store. The new product comparison pulls data directly from your item pages via AJAX to the sections, allowing users to compare any similar products on the fly without leaving the page. Other solutions utilize both external application hosting subject to services fees and a reliance of uptime as well as in most cases, a less intuitive presentation in context of your store.
Nextopia – Sanjay Arora, Founder and CEO. I’ve known Sanjay for several years because Nextopia’s Ecomm/Search application powered 6 of my sites for several years for their search functionality. Nextopia, a Summit co-sponsor, has really grown since we started with them, and now has more than 300 Yahoo! Stores among its 1,000+ customer base.
Kingwebmaster – known for making the impossible possible, George Chiyat, Co-Founder of Kingwebmaster was very excited to speak to me about his Promo Manager (which I help named) Promo Manage is simple to use. The Promo Manager is a powerful marketing tool designed to allow you to create offers, market them and easy modify them until you reach your sales goals. By using a set of conditions to give your customers specific rewards, you can create a virtually unlimited amount of promotions customized to your preferences. He said that store owners who have signed up are seeing increases in conversion rates and higher order totals.
Top Right – Ron Pereira, Founder. Ron a new dad was excited to share with me about his single coupon feature. Top right has makes it easy for your to create and assign codes to specific customers based on the rules you create in the Top Right backend. This can be automatically integrated to your email message and send to the customer. It’s ideal for rewards program.
Exclusive Concepts – is helping store owners focus on their sale conversion to get ready for the holiday season. Dan Theirl tells me that its not too last to check out their “Conversion on Demand” package that can easily to rolled out in the next few weeks. Tools like Daily Deal Bar, Cart closer, Peel away ads are some of the easy and effective way to maximize the traffic that turns your visitors into customers.
EY Studios – Eric Yonge, CEO was so excited about supporting my blog that he said that the first 10 people to comment on the my blog with ‘EY Rocks’ gets a free site review with them. Please include your email where you can be reached. Sign up and comment below.
YourStoreWizards – They’re encouraging store owners to work on their product feeds to get ready for the holiday season. I asked them if all stores do feeds by now. And they said, you’ll be surprised about the missing opportunity that store owners are not taking advantage of by providing feeds to places like Google Base, Bing Shopping, the find and shopping comparison engines.
Practical Data – Joel Jimenez, Co-Founder shared with me the successes that his clients are experiencing with “My Rewards” program. This feature encourages customer loyalty by offering points for purchases. Rewards can be redeemed via use of gift certificates or in products.
Fastpivot – Matthew Ledford, CEO is focusing on social media for Yahoo Stores. With their new social tools, their goal is to ensure that your social media campaigns are consistent through out the different medium in promoting your brand. Features like the Facebook “like” button as well as a professional Facebook Branded pages, help keep your customers engage with your company and with their social connections.
StoneEdge Technologies – Barney Stone, Founder has been helping Yahoo stores manage their order and inventory needs since the late 90’s. Their tool helps manage orders, customers, payment processing, inventory, purchasing, receiving, picking/packing, shipping, returns, exchanges and much much more. As I can personally attest, you will not be able to take your business to the next level without a backend system like StoneEdge order manager.
With more than 20 years retail/wholesale & e-commerce experience, Shirley Tan educates eCommerce business owners to be profitable while maintaining their sanity!
Very cool! Thanks for this synopsis Shirley. Were you representing ecommercefaststart.com?
Hi Andrew:
Not exactly, but I did announce it during the conference. Yes, we’re excited and kind of buried with work right now.
It was good seeing you Shirley. I thought the Yahoo Summit was good for both store owners and merchants. I left with a lighter wallet but know that what I put into my store will definitely pay off in the future.
Nice to see you as well. Live 11 Vegas? Will you be there?