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You now know how to add items and sections to your site, upload images, and retrieve your orders. This page explains the rest of what you'll need to know to create your store.
To continue, return to the Yahoo! Store front page (http://store.yahoo.com), log in, and click on your store name in the left hand column. Once in your store Manager, select Simple or Regular edit.
Many stores have some text on the front page explaining what the site is about. To add text to your front page, go to the front page and click on the Edit button.
You'll see a field labelled Message. Enter some text there. If you want multiple paragraphs, just separate them with blank lines. But don't put too much text on your front page, if you can help it.
Click on Update, and you'll see the text you added at the top of the page.
You can add interest to your site by putting an image on your front page. Go to the front page, click on Image, and you will be able to upload an image just as you would for an item.
For your front page, choose the same kind of image you would choose for the front page of a brochure about your company: a picture of your most impressive product, for example.
Successful online stores usually have one or more items featured on the front page. We're going to do this for one of the items you've created.
Start by going to the page of the item you uploaded the image for. Creating a special will work even if you did not upload an image for the item, but it will be more interesting if the item has an image.
At the bottom of the item's page, there should be a button labelled Special. Click on that, and the next thing you should see is your front page, with that item featured at the top.
If the item had an image, you should see a smaller thumbnail version of it here, plus the name and price of the item. If the item didn't have an image, you'll only see the name and price.
The thumbnail image of the special is a link direct to that item's page. If you want to remove the item from the specials, go to the item's page (by clicking on the thumbnail image), and you will see that there is now an edit button labelled Not Special. Just click on that to remove the item from the specials.
We advise you to change your specials regularly, preferably every few days. It is an easy way to show visitors that your site is alive.
So far your site should have one section, with two items in it. The items are listed in the order you created them. Let's see how to rearrange them.
Go to the section you created and click on the the Move button. The edit buttons should then be replaced by some text telling you to click on the item you want to move. We're going to move the second item, so click on it.
Usually, if you clicked on an item link within a section, you would go to that item's page, but because we are in the middle of a Move, clicking on the item link merely tells
Yahoo! Store that this item is the one we want to move.
Now, instead of the edit buttons, you'll see some text asking you to click on the link you'd like this item to replace. Since you only have two items in your section, you only have one choice: the other item.
So click on the other item, and next thing you should see is your section page with the links to the two items swapped.
That's how you rearrange the contents of a section.
Click on Move, click on the link you want to move, and then
click on where you want that link to be. All the other links on the page will get bumped along to make space for it.
If you want to rearrange the order of your pages listed in the navigation buttons, click on Move on the front page. You can also rearrange the specials on the front page this way.
If you've used a word processor, you are probably familiar with the idea of cutting. When you cut something, it is not deleted, but kept on a clipboard so that you can put it somewhere else later. Cutting works the same way in Yahoo! Store.
We're going to try cutting one of the items from your section. So, from the section page, click on either of the items, and you'll go to that item's page.
You should see an edit button labelled "Cut" at the bottom of the item's page. Click on that, and you will cut this item from whatever contains it, and put it on the clipboard.
The next thing you'll see is the page of the section that used to contain this item. But now the item won't be listed there. Instead, you should see the clipboard underneath the edit buttons, with one thing on it: the item you just cut.
If you were to publish your site now, no page would be generated for that item. So cutting something is a way to remove it temporarily from your site.
Cutting is also the way you move an item from one section to another (or to the front page).
To illustrate this, we're going to create another section, and put the cut item in it. So go up to your front page and add a new section. Call it whatever you want.
After you create the new section, you should be on its page. On the clipboard at the bottom of the page, you should see a link representing the item you cut earlier. Click on that link, and the item on the clipboard will be pasted into your new section.
That's all you have to do to move something from one section to another.
If you want to, you can move whole sections this way. If you click on Cut when you are on a section page, you will cut the section and everything beneath it, just as when you cut off a branch of a tree, you also get the smaller branches growing out of it. Later, when you paste the cut section somewhere, its contents go with it.
Deleting is like cutting, except that whatever you delete gets thrown away instead of being put on the clipboard.
To delete an item, go to its page and click on the edit button labelled Delete. You'll be told what you are about to delete, and asked if you're sure you want to.
If you're not sure you want to delete, click on "No: Cancel", and you will be sent back where you came from. If you're sure you want to delete, click on "Yes: Delete", and that item (or items) is gone for good.
You can delete whole sections at a time. To delete a section, go to its page and click on Delete. You'll be shown a list of all the things you are about to delete: the section and everything it contains. Be very careful deleting whole sections.
Warning: Whenever you delete something, it is gone for good. So if you just want to take something out of your site temporarily, use Cut instead of Delete, so that you can get the material back off the clipboard later.
On every page you will see an edit button labelled Variables. Click on that, and you will see a list of the overall properties of your site.
The variables are global. They are like the weather; if you change something in the variables, every page in your site will be changed accordingly. (You can override variables on individual pages.)
At the top of the variables page, for example, you will see the title of your site. This is the name that appears at the top of each page, in the shopping basket, etc. You can't change your account name (what you give when you log in), but you can change the name of your site.
Two other variables you may want to change are Name-image and Final-text.
If you upload an image as your Name-image, it will appear at the top of every page. Use an image that is long and narrow, ideally less than 80 pixels high. We strongly advise using a logo that is less than 20k in file size.
Your Final-text will appear at the bottom of every page, so that is the place to put an 800 number or email address, for example.
It is usually a good idea to have some pages of information in your site, as well as products for sale. For example, you might want to have a message from your president, a company history, an explanation of how your products are made, directions for visitors, or a list of awards your site has won.
Creating a page of ordinary information is like creating a product page. Just go to the section where you want to put it, and click on New Item.
In Yahoo! Store, an item is not necessarily a product for sale: it is just the smallest unit of information in your site. So if you leave the Price and Code fields blank in an item, it will be just a page of information. You can upload an image for that page, just as you would upload an image for an item representing a product for sale.
When you placed the test order from your site, there was only one possible payment method and one possible shipping method. You'll want to customize these for your store.
You set up shipping and payment methods through the Manager. So go to the Yahoo! Store home page, click on Manager, and log in with your account name and password.
On the Manager page you'll see links labelled Payment and Shipping Methods. To set the forms of payment accepted by your store, click on Payment. You'll see a list of links representing payment types. Click on whichever ones you want to accept. If you want to accept a form of payment not on the list (your store charge card, for example), enter it into the box at the bottom.
When you're done, click on the name of your site in the upper right. That leads back to the Manager page. From the Manager page, click on Ship Methods. You'll see a page that works just like the payment methods page.
Next: Add Features to Your Store
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