Developing an ecommerce store for Yahoo’s Merchant Solutions should’ve been a pleasant task. But what I got myself into was a mess — and Yahoo knows it.
My friend’s online business has been using an older ecommerce system called “Yahoo Store”, now referred to by Yahoo as “Legacy Store”. The system included quite a few nice tools (click trails, visitor analysis… etc) for roughly $60/mon plus 1.5% + $0.30 per transaction charges. Not bad for a solid and secured shopping cart that just works.
After spending some time going through Yahoo’s documentation on its newer “Merchant Solutions” ecommerce suites, introduced last September, I thought the prices were great for the price ($100/mon plus 1% + $0.30 per transaction). So I suggested an upgrade to take advantage of the lower % rate (that alone would save him a few hundred dollars on a monthly basis) in addition to robust features (php, MySQL… etc) that I could use to help develop the site into a more dynamic and user friendly one. The objective was to boost buyer conversion.
Now, the store already has several hundred active items in Yahoo’s proprietary database. The store is active with tons of daily sales. I envisioned the transition from the its current design to my template in three or four phases to roll out one thing at a time. Or so I thought.
First, Yahoo tech support and sales (two separate calls) painted a rosey picture of the upgrade. Everything would transfer to the new system transparently, they implied. I have dealt with Yahoo before with happy results. Plus it’s a very reputable company with a startup spirit. Great! This is going to be fun!
What Yahoo’s tech support and ALL of its documentations failed to mention was, upgraded legacy sites would NOT operate quite the same way as described in those tutorials and documentations. Such careless detail, conveniently ignored by at least 3 tech supports I spoke to and countless documenations I read, caused store items to disappear, and thus unorderable by paying customers.
When I called Yahoo tech support and spoke to TWO different tech support people about the scenario (after numerous customer complaints on a Monday morning), they were BOTH well awared of the issue (they basically spoke my mind describing the problem better than I could), apologized profusely and basically acknowledged there was NOTHING Yahoo could do about it — that meant I’d have to manually catalog each and every one of the 500+ items that should’ve been there — BY HAND –> (create item object, name item, write item description, caption, create price) x 500.
WTF!!
The problem is related to Yahoo’s flawed design in how the data is referenced by its legacy stores. When the catalog was transferred to the new service, Yahoo’s documentation made no mention of how the newly created catalog database would be referenced by the legacy store. So when I logged in, I just saw a single table of 500+ items. All of its documentations, on the other hand, encouraged merchants to manipulate this database by creating custom tables and sub-catalogrize items accordingly for easy management by its own web-based management tools. The problem that’s not documented was, once an item is moved out of the default table into a differnt one, that item is forever lost in the eyes of the legacy store. Even if the item was restored to its original table that Yahoo created, legacy store still would not see it. And get this, THIS ONLY HAPPENS TO CUSTOMERS UPGRADING FROM LEGACY STORES. Talk about biting the hands that feed you! Fu*king Yahoo.
But after patiently, politely and persistently asking the second tech support to review ways to restore the table to its former state (which I KNOW for a fact Yahoo is capable of), he found someone who was able to do it in two minutes. And all was well again. I wonder what that “we can’t do anything about it” claim was all about. Fu*king Yahoo.
How can a company, with all its technological know-how, miss such fatal flaw in its design? Worst yet, if tech support is awared of the issue, how come it’s not documented accordingly for upgrade customers? And according to the tech supports I spoke to, this is an internally well-documented issue which their “publishing department refuses to include” in their external documentation. Both tech guys told me they get MANY calls every week about this problem.
Now, I wonder how Yahoo can stay in this business for long. Fu*king Yahoo.