Yahoo Summit 2010 – Vendor Summary
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 an 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 service 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. 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 name). Promo Manager is simple to use. The Promo Manager is a powerful marketing tool designed to allow you to create offers, market them, and easily 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 made it easy for you to create and assign codes to specific customers based on the rules you create in the Top Right backend. This can be automatically integrated into your email message and sent 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 it’s not too late to check out their “Conversion on Demand” package that can easily be rolled out in the next few weeks. Tools like, Daily Deal Bar, Cart closer, and Peel away ads, are some of the easy and effective ways 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 my blog, with “EY Rocks”, gets a free site review from 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. 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 throughout the different medium in promoting your brand. Features like the Facebook “like” button, as well as a professional Facebook Brand page, help keep your customers engaged 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 90s. 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.
By: Shirley Tan
