Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Selecting a Yahoo! Plan

As we mention throughout this book, rarely does a one-size-fits-all solution exist for building your online business. Yahoo! offers different levels of its Merchant Solutions service to coincide with the size and scope of your business. The beauty is that as your company grows, your Yahoo! plan can grow with it as you move up the scale to a more robust set of services.

With other services, you have to choose your features à la carte by cobbling together a plan. Yahoo! gives all its merchants quite a strong foundation, offering enhancements for its larger clients to fulfill the needs of a growing customer base. Yahoo! has years of experience in offering different tools — such as e-mail, Web hosting, and marketing support — and those refined tools help make these packages that much more accessible.

Starter package: Starting out

Don't let the name fool you — the Yahoo! Starter package isn't a stripped-down, bargain basement tool that holds only five or ten products. This package provides quite a rich set of features and is an excellent jumping-on point for new e-commerce retailers.

With the Starter package, you get the ability to build your own store, host any number of products, and design your site by using Yahoo! tools. Some of the more advanced marketing and reporting techniques are reserved for the more expensive packages, but most small businesses wouldn't even need them.

Standard package: Moving up

The medium Yahoo! solution is its Standard package, ...