How to sell in

Many people keep asking us how we (Global Marketplace) manage to sell so many items through our
Yahoo Store sites. I have listed below what we have learned so far.

1. First, our sales are based mostly on people finding our site through search engines.
Products listed on our sites are automatically listed in the Yahoo Shopping search
index as well as the shopping index of AltaVista, Lycos, InfoSeek, WebCrawler,
HotBot, Excite, Google, and many other search engines. This is based on an
arrangement Yahoo has with them. Yahoo sends updates for each page on our site
to these search engines weekly. We have a store at LycosShop also. If you search
for hacky sacks at LycosShop you will be referred to our Yahoo Store and not our
LycosShop store. A full 1/3 of our sales come directly from people searching in
Yahoo Shopping. Having a store hosted by Yahoo is the lowest cost way to get
individual products listed there. Yahoo is by far the most used shopping portal.

2. We carry items that have familiar product names that are also items only we or a
few other vendors have. An example would be "worry dolls". We have made many
sales to people who typed in "worry dolls", were sent to our site and then purchased
something (usually the worry dolls and 2 or 3 other items).

This is not something most online stores can do. The solution to this problem is for
these vendors to be on a site like our Marketplace Site with 20-30 other vendors
with similar but different items ( like all crafts, but different crafts) listing 800-1000
items. With this many items the chances are better someone will find one of those
items somewhere and then be referred to our site and see all the other items we
have.

3. The type of product must be in the product name. For example, do not have a
section on earrings and then name one style "Celtic". You need to name the product
"Celtic Earrings" so people looking for earrings or celtic items will find it.

4. There should always be a good quality image of the product on the product page
along with a good first part of the description. You need enough info in first part of
description to get people to click. For example - "Price includes shipping - Colorful
Celtic Pendant from Mexico ..." The price will show up with the listing, so that does
not need to be in the description.

5. Good customer service is rewarded at Yahoo Shopping. If you allow customers
to rate you (and we do), and you do a good job of sending the order fast, you will
get good to excellent ratings. Get enough of these (the exact formula is not known)
and Yahoo gives us the "Top Service" star. THIS IS EVERYTHING! Top service
vendors show up at the top of the listings, even if their are 1,000 items that normally
would have been ahead of us. We have that at our Retail site. Our sales shot up they
day we received that status. We will soon have it at our Wholesale site.

At our Marketplace Site all the vendors get the "Top Service" award if service is
good, and they all will lose it if just a few vendors do a bad job and do not ship on
time or never ship. They will be removed before they can hurt everyone else. It may
take a few weeks to get the "Top Service" status at this site, but when we do sales
we go way up!

6. Free Shipping - If you offer to ship for free (keeping the retail price the same)
more people will but your crafts. Also, at this time online retailers do not have to
collect sales tax.