Make Money Online with a Yahoo Store Yahoo Stores make it easy to start an internet based business from the comfort of your own home. Yahoo offers everything you need to start your business from the ground up by providing easy web design templates, shopping carts, easy merchant service signups, and much more. Everything is at your finger tips waiting for you to start making money with your online store front. Yahoo is the second most visited webpage in America and the most visited webpage in the world. When you build an ecommerce website with Yahoo you are advertising your business to most of the world and be in front of millions. With yahoo you do not have to spend the time hunting down customers to buy from you, instead the customers will be running to you for the items. Yahoo stores can be very profitable but you must be responsible in your business transactions and maintain proper business ethics to remain successful. Before you jump into your new business venture you need to have a detailed merchandising strategy to assure success. Merchandising is the way in which you promote your products like how many items will be promoted on your front page and how they will be arranged on the page. Your home page is your store front; this page needs to be properly designed to give your new store a professional feel with easy navigation. Your home page receives the most visitors out of all of your pages. Your customers have to go to this page first and you need them to want to look further into your store and get them to keep coming back. Your home page is where you showcase all of your limited time offers, seasonal specials, and your most popular items. Update your home page regularly to give your customers a fresh selection of items and to attract more customers to your store. Updating your store regularly will keep your customers coming back to your store to see what is new or what’s on sale to ensure repeat business. Creating a professional looking homepage for your Yahoo store is easy with Yahoo’s Wizard. With the Wizard you can create your own webpage or you can create your webpage using any other programs like Dreamweaver and Front Page. If you are uncomfortable building your webpage yourself, Yahoo also has professional web page designers that will build you a custom web page with all of your specifications to utilize the full potential of your yahoo store. If you would prefer to have your own graphic webpage designer build your webpage you can too. You are in control of your store and how it is promoted and displayed. There are many incentives that you can offer your customers to ensure repeat business. Gift Certificates are a very positive way to get referrals and customer satisfaction. Gift certificates are like pre paid checks that can only be redeemed or spent at your store. This is a great way to receive referrals. If a customer visits your yahoo store and sees an item that they themselves may not be interested in but they know someone who is interested in this item they can purchase a gift certificate through your store and give it as a gift to someone else. After purchase of a gift certificate the certificate code is emailed to the customer and they can redeem this certificate while checking out at only your store. Another great way for repeat business is collecting email addresses of your previous customers and providing them with newsletters, special offers, discounts and coupons through emails. With Yahoo Stores you also have the option to capture email addresses as they are checking out their newly purchased items. Yahoo’s GOT Campaigner is a perfect example of the valuable features offered with expanding your business through a Yahoo Store. The GOT campaigner will help you grow your customer base while ensuring repeat business. Also offered with this program is the ROI measurer. The ROI or Return on Investment will measure the return on each direct emailing campaign to find out what works for your company and what doesn’t. With everything that the yahoo stores offer you can have your new ecommerce store up and running in no time at all. PPPPP Word Count 716