In the Spotlight: Store customers can now ship to multiple addresses
Premium Feature: Commission Junction offers affiliate marketing
Store Building Tip: Cross selling for fun and profit with the "Family" variable
Order Form Feature: Sharing customer comments with your staff
E-commerce on the Web: Links to sites, features, and stories

In the Spotlight: Store customers can now ship to multiple addresses

We’ve built a new shopping cart feature that lets customers ship different items to multiple addresses in a single session. This multiple shipment capability is designed with your order processing needs in mind -- each recipient is assigned a unique order ID, so you can track each shipment as an individual order.

Customers place items they want to buy into the shopping cart. When customers arrive on the checkout page, they can click on the "Send to more than one address" link. This action automatically creates checkboxes next to each item on the order form. Then the customer cycles through and enters the shipping address and credit card number for each separate shipment.

Here's an example:

Donald Duck is buying sporting goods for his nephews. He loads up his shopping cart with lots of baseball gear. First, Uncle Donald selects a bat, ball, and glove for his nephew Huey, fills in the quantities, and proceeds through the normal checkout process for the first recipient, Huey in Cleveland. Once Donald has filled out Huey's order and received the order confirmation, he clicks on "Ship to Address #2." He's returned to the shopping cart (with the same items in it as before) to repeat the process for the second recipient, Dewey in Canton, and finally for Louie, the third recipient, at yet another address, in Cincinnati.

Uncle Donald only enters his billing information once. However, he is prompted to enter the shipping address and the credit card number as he cycles through checkout for each of his nephews. When he completes an individual order, he sees a unique order confirmation for each shipment. As he places each order and enters each address, the order form displays an updated running total of the dollar amount he has spent during the session.

We enlisted the help of seasoned Yahoo! Store merchants to test and evaluate this new feature. Thanks to everybody who participated. (No ducks were harmed in testing shipments to multiple addresses.)

To enable this feature go to the "Order Form" link in the Order Settings column, scroll down to "Multiple Ship To" and change the setting to Yes.

Want to see how it works? Check out a demo of this new feature on our "fictitious" test store

Premium Feature: Commission Junction offers affiliate marketing

Commission Junction invites you to participate in their affordable, easy-to-use online affiliate marketing program. It's used by more than 1,500 merchants and 350,000 content sites to recruit affiliates and then to manage and administer referrals, traffic, and payments. Commission Junction is now available to Yahoo! Store merchants who want to implement an affiliate program.

Here's a very basic summary of how affiliate marketing works on the Web: You recruit web businesses and content providers who wish to earn commissions by referring customers to your store. When a customer completes a purchase after arriving at your store via a link on the affiliate site, the affiliate receives a small commission. Creating a referral network of affiliates (publishers) who target the same users as you, allows you to extend your advertising reach, build your brand, improve sales, and lower customer acquisition costs -- all on a pay-for-performance basis.

Entrance fees, set-up, tracking, and billing are handled within the Commission Junction web console. Visit to sign up for your Commission Junction ID and begin setting up your account.

Once you have your ID, open the Store Manager, and go to the "Affiliate Program" link in the Promote column. Enter your Commission Junction ID, choose your settings, and click "Update."

Welcome to the power of affiliate marketing from Commission Junction.

Store Building Tip: Cross selling for fun and profit with the "Family" variable

Cross selling is an effective retail strategy that we've adapted for selling online. Offer related items to your customer at checkout time, basing your suggestions on the items that they've already placed in their shopping cart. If a customer is buying a camera you can offer film, if they're buying golf clubs see if they want golf balls, if they're buying jeans offer a new belt or colorful t-shirt.

Set up your Yahoo! Store to suggest cross-sells automatically. It only takes two steps:

1. Define a family of related products by naming a group of items within the "Family" variable.
   
2. Assign an item to a family by editing it and giving it a family name from the associated "Family" menu.

Once you've defined a family, and designated the Family property for at least two items, a customer who orders one of those items will see a special message and related product links at checkout time.

You decide on the wording of the cross-sell message - it's controlled by the variable Cross-sell-text, which you can set once for all your products or override for individual items. Keep in mind that a family name must begin with a letter and can consist of letters and numbers only (no spaces or other special characters are permitted).

Order Form Feature: Sharing customer comments with your staff

Did you know that if you use the customer-rating feature in the Store Manager you could have copies of rating feedback sent to multiple email addresses within your organization? You might want to share customer comments with your customer care, shipping, and sales personnel so they know what your customers are saying. Here's how to do it:

Go to the Order Settings column in your Store Manager, click on the "Order Form" link, then scroll down to "Customer Rating." After you've enabled the feature, simply enter the email addresses into the second form, separated by commas - nothing but email addresses should be entered into this field.

E-commerce on the Web: Links to sites, features, and stories

Make Friends With Competing Search Engine Links

In this article, Eric Ward, a web marketing pioneer and online brand builder, offers an innovative link-swapping strategy. He proposes a way to use search keywords to build alliances rather than rivalry between web businesses that are jockeying for position in search results. It's an online application of the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. Piggyback on the high ranking of successful, well-crafted sites that offer similar products or services or popular related content but don't compete directly with your offering. Offer to exchange links - and watch two-way traffic grow.