Yahoo Stores rolled out its first release of the year with a number of enhancements, including new ways to let customers know about its "Saved Cards" feature. Saved Cards lets customers go through checkout without having to re-enter their payment and billing address information every time they shop at a merchant's Yahoo Store.

Saved Cards now has two options for informing registered customers about the feature. According to the announcement, "You may now display information about saving card information as a dismissible information box that appears after a customer completes their order and reaches the order confirmation page, or you may continue to display this information inline on the order confirmation page."

Yahoo said it also fixed issues affecting the use of the Saved Cards feature when the "Billing Address" section is hidden in checkout.

Scott Smigler, President of Exclusive Concepts, a Yahoo Small Business Partner that works with Yahoo Store merchants, said the Saved Cards feature was the most significant of this week's enhancements, since online retailers who maximize repeat sales can spend more to drive traffic to their site, which accelerates both their sales and profits.

"Now that the feature has been added, we'll be running scientific conversion tests to optimize its sales impact," he said.

Smigler also added that he was happy to see the tweaks Yahoo Stores made to the Page Redirect Manager and to the Coupon Manager, which he said enables merchants to drive revenue. "The enhancements make the Coupon Manager easy to use. For example, some merchants have a high volume of active coupon codes, and the enhancement addresses performance issues that may effect some of those users."

Readers can find more details on Yahoo Stores January release page.