UPDATED: Yahoo! Store / Yahoo! Small Business *IS* up for sale

 
"They have been approached by [major buyout firms] but they are proactively looking to sell to a strategic investor like a Careerbuilder or Monster.com," peHUB quoted a source as saying.

Am tracking stories here:
http://www.robsnell.com/is-yahoo-small-business-hot-jobs-yahoo-store-for-sale.html

July 22, 2009

Looks like Yahoo! Store *IS* for sale. I heard rumors buzzing all over the IRCE 2009 show, but no one would say who!

Now some folks I know are sharing intel. No names and no company names that I can share yet, but it looks like things are coming to a head.

from Greg Sterling's Search Engine Land article:

Yahoo is trying to control expenses, shed groups and properties that are not strategic and invest where the most value is to be found. However, given Bartz’s remarks about the importance of local and small business advertising and its newspaper consortium, it’s very strange that Yahoo would be selling these two properties.

I TOTALLY agree with GS here. What's up with Carol Bartz and the Yahoo! Executive team?

As a Yahoo! Small business customer since 1998, I've always had the confidence that EVEN THOUGH Y!SB and Yahoo! Store were small potatoes compared to the $$$ in display advertising and search marketing (PPC), the Yahoo! Store part of Y!SB was so profitable that Y! would leave it alone.

My guess is that Y! generates 4-5 BILLION (with a B) in sales for the 45-50K Yahoo! Store owners and gets $125 MILLION a year in rent and revenue share fees from merchants.

IN MY DUMMIES BOOK I wrote:

Yahoo! is pretty serious about its Web-hosting business. It’s not a sideline or an afterthought. Nowadays, anyone with a T1 line and a server can set up a box and be a "Web-hosting company," but sometimes it takes a $45 billion market-cap company to do things right.

Well, does it?

Yahoo! Store is also a recognized name brand for shoppers, so potential customers feel more comfortable shopping with you.

We use Yahoo!'s domain for our checkouts! And we just switched from store.yahoo.com to store.yahoo.net. Changing the cart to a non-Yahoo! DOMAIN will be even more confusing to our regular customers.

What about uptime? Load balancing infrastructure? Image hosting with Akamai? Is this still true?

For example, huge surges in traffic aren’t a problem when you have a Yahoo! Store. Yahoo! has an incredible load-balancing infrastructure so that you don’t have to worry, for example, if your store gets mentioned on Oprah and 10,000 people suddenly swarm your store.

I STILL really don’t understand all of this propeller-head stuff, but I’ve seen stores handle tons of traffic (10,000 people a day) and not crash.

Yahoo! Stores can also handle the huge spikes in (overall Internet) traffic, for example, like the Christmas rush, where the entire Internet is swamped with millions more shoppers than usual.

And what about all those YAHOO domain URLs?
  On Google I show:
    site:store.yahoo.com 29,700
    site:store.yahoo.com 419,000
    site:stores.yahoo.net 662,000

Also, Yahoo! Small Business has over 2,000,000 "customers" but I'm at least 50 or 60 of those because they count each domain owner and/or hosting account and/or Yahoo! ID as a separate customer.

Yahoo! is a bit expensive compared to bargain-basement Web-hosting and Shopping Cart software. Honestly, you’ll pay more for Web hosting when you have a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions account, but I believe this expense is actually a good thing because you really do get what you pay for.

Look, any time there's a major change, the bean counters always look for ways to sneak in a price increase. I wonder if there will be revenue share changes? But why should I share revenue with a (speculation) Monster.com?

And what about the people? Y!SB has a killer staff? The last round of layoffs cut REALLY deep. We lost some good folks.

I don't know how I feel about this...

Rob Snell

Yahoo Store owner, author, blogger, evangelist since 1997:

PS (speculation) It would be pretty damn funny if Yahoo! Store became Monster Store, especially after Yahoo! tried to buy Steph and Ryan's MonsterCommerce.com but NetSol beat 'em to the punch.

PPS FYI -- Reporter peeps: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions is the catchall marketing name for Yahoo! Small Business division’s services package, which includes domains, business e-mail, Web hosting, and Store. The “Store” part of Merchant Solutions is what used to be called Yahoo! Store and consists of the Store Manager and Store Editor.

Comments

[Kurt]

You're right Rob. I can't imagine what is going through Y! minds at this moment. They have a good product, that with a little attention, could be a great product. I agree with Sterling when he writes "I always believed that Yahoo has not fully exploited Small Business as a channel."

It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.