Yahoo Shopping is similar to Froogle. You just do a datafeed and your products magically appear in Yahoo Shopping as product catalog entries. What a deal! Unfortunately, as easy as this is to do, it’s also expensive. Yahoo Shopping is going to charge you for every clickthrough. This charge seems small. If you assume that every clickthrough is a sale, the fees don’t look like much. It’s unlikely, however, that each click-through will be a sale. The ratio of click-throughs to sales will be different for different kinds of products, but it’s likely to be high enough to become a major expense for selling your products.

Therefore, Yahoo Shopping is something to experiment with. It’s not something to jump into with both feet and assume that you will have profitable retail sales.

Keep in mind that Yahoo has about 20 percent of the search engine market while Google has over 50 percent of the market. It seems likely that both Froogle and Yahoo Shopping will reflect the market shares of their parents. That is, Froogle will have about 50 percent of the market, and Yahoo Shopping will have about 20 percent. But the fact is that Yahoo Shopping charges click-through fees and is unlikely to get as many retailers.

The retailers that do sell through Yahoo Shopping are likely to charge more (i.e., pass along the cost of Yahoo click-through fees). You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that it’s unlikely that Yahoo Shopping will do as well as Froogle. Indeed, the Froogle market share may turn out to be above the market share of Google. A bigger marketplace attracts more potential buyers. More potential buyers create a better marketplace for online retailers.

Details

To do a Yahoo Shopping datafeed go to Yahoo Product Submit at http:/ /smallbusiness.yahoo.com/marketing/prodsubmit.php. There is all the information you need to get started on Yahoo Shopping. The Yahoo datafeed is similar to Froogle.

Yahoo also provides storefronts (websites) for ecommerce, Yahoo Merchant Solutions (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant). This is a popular hosting service. If you use a Yahoo storefront, you get a modest discount on Yahoo Shopping click-through fees. Although Yahoo Merchant is a significant marketplace, it doesn’t seem to me to be a strong competitor to eBay. You are most likely better off with an eBay Store, particularly if you use eBay auctions to promote your eBay Store. It’s certainly possible to have both an eBay Store and a Yahoo
storefront just as it is to put your products on both Froogle and Yahoo Shopping. But is it worth the extra expense?

Note that Yahoo Merchant and Yahoo Shopping are separate systems, each with its own separate fees. Also note that Yahoo Merchant is a reasonable means of establishing a presense on the Web—probably preferrable to an independant website—if you choose not to use an eBay Store.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Yahoo Shopping would be comparable to Froogle in cost-effectiveness were it not for the fact that it charges for each click-through. You will have to experiment with Yahoo Shopping to determine whether it’s cost-effective for your retail business. It is important here to keep track of Froogle and Yahoo Shopping sales separately and do not mix them together. If you mix them together, it will be difficult to analyze whether Yahoo Shopping is worth the price of the click-throughs.