"If you build it, they will come" does not necessarily apply to ecommerce websites - merchants must find ways to drive traffic to their sites. So what's a small online seller to do? Jimmy Duvall, Yahoo's Director of E-Commerce Products, discusses Yahoo Merchant Solution and Yahoo Stores in the latest Ecommerce Industry SoundBytes podcast produced by AuctionBytes.com.

Yahoo Small Business recently completed its "Open for Business" initiative, an upgrade of its Merchant Solutions ecommerce platform (commonly called Yahoo Stores) that streamlined the process of launching a professional-looking and successful online store.

During the 14-minute podcast, Yahoo's Duvall touched upon the ease of setting up a store - including the design process and the availability of PayPal integration. He also discussed the importance of marketing for small merchants.

Yahoo's Open For Business enhancements enable merchants to more quickly and easily build and open online retail businesses. According to Yahoo, its online stores are search-engine friendly and offer the following features to help increase page-ranking in search-engine results:

• Yahoo automatically codes pages with titles and descriptions based on the merchant's page content, which merchants can change and update at any time.
• All pages built with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions follow a standard coding format so that search engines can easily read and index the page content.
• Each page has a static URL that can be customized to include the page keyword, which can help improve store page ranking in search engine results for that term.

Yahoo said more than 40,000 online merchants use its ecommerce platform.

Podcast available at: http://podcast.auctionbytes.com

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/plans.php