Yahoo relaunches Yahoo stores, an e-commerce platform for SMEs

Yahoo has relaunched its Yahoo! Small business platform, which helps small enterprises become business empires of tomorrow.

“Today, we’re excited to introduce Yahoo Stores, a completely reimagined, next-generation version of our eCommerce platform that will help anyone start, build and grow a successful business online.  For most retailers, an online store is crucial, but getting it started is an arduous task that can take weeks. With Yahoo Stores, you can have an online store up-and-running and accepting orders in less than a couple of minutes. Our platform offers a seamless payment processing experience that is automatically PCI compliant, connecting you directly with a payment service provider in just a few clicks.” Amit Kumar, Head of Yahoo Small Business writes on their Tumblr blog

Yahoo stores provide automatic SEO which means that your store will have the same serving technology used on Yahoo.com, including relevant keywords in your website URLs, concise descriptions of your website’s content and more. The team also published a video on the same topic

Options start at $10.95 per month (which comes with $100 credit for search marketing on Bing) – Considering e-commerce players are one of the heaviest advertisers on google, could this be Yahoo’s way of turning the sellers’ attentions on to their platform?

Whatever it is, this seems to be a fairly reasonable rate to experiment with and see if Yahoo’s backing leads to better sales. Google, your move now!