Archive for June, 2005

When attempting to set up my Yahoo Local Search setup, I used terms such as “website marketing” and “marketing consultant” to which Yahoo’s editorial gods said:

“Yahoo! Search Marketing has decided that it does not wish to be associated with certain types of behavior and products in its Local Sponsored Search product. This includes, but is not limited, to businesses that offer the following: firearms, fireworks, explosives, tobacco and smoking products and prescription drugs. ”

Man, I always thought my work was sort of “clean-cut”

This is the real world, sites change hands, businesses are sold, and nobody can predict it.

So when a store owning two Yahoo! stores with the same Yahoo IDs needs to sell one of the stores to someone else (with a different Yahoo! Id) it would seem to be a simple matter.

Well, it’s not.

Yahoo will not allow you to re-associate a Yahoo! Store with a new Yahoo ID. You must **close** the Yahoo! store and open it with a NEW ID and a NEW DOMAIN NAME. Essentially, it will kill you!

How hard could it be for them to provide a transition mechanism for this situation?

Lesson Learned:

NEVER, EVER EVER use the same Yahoo! Id for more than one Yahoo Store or Yahoo Merchant Solutions account. ALWAYS use a unique, non-personal, special ID for it.

Never use your own personal Yahoo! ID for a Yahoo store. Always make up a new one that “belongs” to the store.

I have been through this FIVE times, and each of these times my clients have been the victim of this nightmare. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth for recommending Yahoo! Merchant Solutions anymore.

[one update: 1/24/06: I managed to get a store fixed after a number of emails and what apparantly was a bunch of trouble for my rep. He came through for me and we were able to recover a domain name for use in a new store. Kudos to Randy Yim and staff members involved for saving my butt. Please make this easier!]

Ok, in this day and age we should expect that simple issues such as billing would go smoothly.

For the past few months, Yahoo business has been billing my card for a “generic” SM Business charge. As I have a couple dozen clients on Yahoo Services, I had assumed that somewhere along the way I had put in my billing info instead of theirs, and it would be easy to trace it out.

So I call Yahoo.

To make a 1-hour-headache-phone-call short, they WOULD NOT help me trace it out. I said, I have the transaction number, here’s a list of all of my clients, and here are the ones that it is most likely to be. I offered to send a PDF or fax of my card statement.

I didn’t have the passwords for my clients, or their security question, but was able to answer A WHOLE LIST of questions THAT ONLY THEY WOULD KNOW. But those were not on Yahoo!’s 4×6 cards, so in the end, I threatened to dispute the charges.

You know, when you have something being charged to your card, you should have a right to a little leeway in figuring it out. I was able to provide at least 10 unique and secret items that identified me, but just because they weren’t on their list of questions, I was out.

Bottom line, NEVER accidentally put your Yahoo Wallet on someone elses services.

Listbuilder is the list marketing mechanism of Microsoft’s bCentral. I’ve been using it forever, and continue to do so because of the single-opt-in system they offer. I’m not going to upload any email address for people not wanting to be on the list, so why bother them with a second opt-in message. Anyway, it’ll be ignored to the tune of 40-50%, meaning I lose half of my list.

It was another dizzying circle of broken English with their chat support. It took me an hour’s chat to get them to tell me about “trigger” words.

Trigger words are special words within emails that will cause a rather obscure error as you import your addresses:

“Your import file appears to contain names of recipients who have not voluntarily registered for an e-mail list”

Huh? Well, it seems that if you have a few of their “super secret trigger” words in your email list : example - childhelper@yahoo.com has “helper” in the name, and so it will not import. Why, I ask? Because it’s a trigger word. … What’s a trigger word? “It’s a word that triggers your error” … you all know the drill. Anyhow, they’re sleepy in Bangalore - it’s like 3 AM.