Complaint Review: Yahoo Stores

To: "Yahoo! Store"
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 11:02 AM
Subject: Re: Yahoo! Store is the leading hosting platform

Yahoo store was one of the most expensive mistakes we ever made. From the very start, "they give me money and we promise you nothing" attitude of Yahoo made us very upset. We were also very upset with technical support when we stated that there was something wrong with the shopping cart, and Yahoo always said there was nothing wrong. Whenever the shopping cart was opened, there were always products left in it from a privious person. Customers stated that they would not buy because the prices included these items even when they removed them.

I spent almost an hour on the phone with tech support over this problem and received the most ignorant responses until we cancelled the store. The total refusal to have anyone fix the issue was the last straw.We would spend hours setting up products in the store and assigning prices and updated them to the server, only to find the next day that the site had reverted to its original state. No amount of attempting to resolve this changed anything, even the many hours on with tech support didn't help. We even changed our passwords, this issue still did not resolve. The shipping calculator had a mind of its own as well and would do whatever when ever it chose.

Placing an ad in the middle of the ordering process where the customer had to give personal information or could not continue ordering was also another big insult. Tech support managed to remove this ad after much confusion about its placement and the shopping cart never worked properly since. According to ALL SALES STATISTICS ANYWHERE IN THE BUSINESS WORLD, for every 100 presentations, irregardless of how bad or good the presentation, there will be 1 sale.

The only sale we had was my father testing the system to see if it worked. Again the shopping cart had an issue that Yahoo had refused to acknowledge or fix. We had several thousand visitors, no one bought a thing. They would go to the shopping cart, it would have its little issue, they would leave. All the products they had left in the cart remained for all to see.

Meanwhile, it cost us money to be in business, while we made no sales and argued with Yahoo tech support to attempt to fix the problems for the almost 3 months we had this store.I did not appreciate Yahoo failing to inform us when we asked about their urls as well. Yahoo's top store within the pet supply niche was cattoystore (ours was thecattoystore). Because of the way metaspiders work, our store was banned from all the search engines including YahooSearch because we were classified as a spam site. Search engines disregard the word THE and saw us as a front door site to cattoystore.com and the banned us.

We could not figure out this issue until we wrote to Google and that was their response. This is outrageous! Yahoo Directory was another unresolved problem. They refused to acknowledge us or our requests in any way. The only e-mail we received from them was useless and totally avoided the questions we asked. All through this experence, we discovered that the basic info of the website (the way it is ordered on the page)is setup so yahoo could control the way we are listed within searches. This effected the way we are placed in the engines we discovered that there is no way to manipulte this info to improve our standing. This interferes with the marketing ability of our business. We were told by a young lady at Yahoo that this is unable to be reordered in any way. This affects the way meta spiders work

John
port st Lucy, Florida
U.S.A.