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Step 8:

Develop your merchandising strategy

Just like a brick and mortar retail business, how and where you display and promote your products on your online store can have a huge impact on your sales.

Merchandising tips for all merchants
Your store homepage will receive the highest amount of traffic of any other page of your site. To make the most of this valuable site real estate you'll want to display several attractively priced products here. Promoting several well-priced products will help increase the sales volume for those items, while also enticing prospective customers to delve deeper into your site to look for other attractive offers. Also, you should frequently rotate your homepage promotions to encourage customers to return to your site to see the latest special offer.

Automate your merchandising
Yahoo! provides several tools in Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional that automate key merchandising functions like cross-selling, discount offers, and gift certificates. These tools are all available in the Store Control Panel.

• Increase customer spending per visit with cross-selling. Cross selling is a powerful sales practice that suggests additional products or services at the point of purchase - when the customer is most inclined to buy. With the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions automatic cross selling engine, you can recommend up to three related products for each item in your inventory. You can also add customized discounts on the related items to encourage purchase. Once you've set up the cross-sells, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions does the selling for you.
• Offer gift certificates. With the Merchant Standard and Professional plans, you can offer electronic gift certificates for sale. Gift certificates can help improve your sales during holiday seasons and make it easy for customers to purchase gifts for birthdays or other occasions. Recipients will be sent the gift certificate electronically and can redeem it at your store during the checkout process. You can also track all of your outstanding gift certificates for accounting purposes from the Store Control Panel.
• Attract customers with coupons. The Coupon Manager feature allows you to create coupons redeemable at your store for a specific dollar amount, percentage off, or free shipping. You can use these coupons in your advertising, email campaigns, or on-site promotions to attract and retain customers and to increase frequency of purchase. To redeem the coupon, all your customers have to do is enter the coupon code during the checkout process. Coupon Manager also lets you track the performance of each coupon program so you can determine which offers are most effective.