Yahoo introduced a comparison shopping service and a trio of ecommerce packages to continue its drive into ecommerce. Yahoo Shopping service offers a way for consumers to comparison shop online and competes with DealTime (which changed its name to Shopping.com on Monday), MySimon.com, Pricegrabber.com and other services.

Yahoo Shopping includes results from merchants on its own platform, including items from Yahoo Stores and Yahoo Auctions. Yahoo Shopping also shows results from periodic crawls through the Web, as well as retailers who opt for Yahoo Shopping's paid inclusion service. Yahoo's recently purchased Overture is supplying relevancy-based ads on the search results page.

Yahoo also introduced Yahoo Merchant Solutions, three new e-commerce packages that are seamlessly integrated with Yahoo Web Hosting services. Each plan includes domain name registration, business email, Web site hosting, and advanced ecommerce functionality. Basics including online payment processing, shopping cart and order management. All three packages provide round-the-clock toll-free phone support.

The low-end plant is called Merchant Starter and is priced at $39.95 per month with a 1.5% transaction fee (commission) and a $50 setup fee that will be waived until 12/31/03.

http://shopping.yahoo.com

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com