Yahoo Small Business

Turn your passion into a business, with everything from web hosting to ecommerce, domains to directory listings management, and more.

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Website Design Service Launched for Small Businesses Ready to Grow

By Ramesh Padmanabhan & Owen Hsiao, Product Management Yahoo Small Business

Yahoo Small Business has introduced Website Design Service to take the headache out of building and maintaining a professional website, and allow small business owners to instead focus their attention on taking care of customers and growing their revenue.

Website Design Service provides the design, engineering, creative and support services required to create, build, launch and manage a professional website with little time and effort required from the small business owner.

Additionally as your business evolves, your website will grow too thanks to the continued support and updates included as part of Website Design Service. Regular content updates and additions to your site will keep it fresh and accurate, as well as potentially increase your appearance in online search and your ability to get new customers.

In order to help websites continue to operate efficiently and securely, Website Design Service includes proactive updates to security plug-ins, and review of all website content for search engine optimization (SEO) before and after launch, which can help the site get higher page rankings and increased organic traffic.

Which Businesses Should Use Website Design Service?

In today’s competitive business climate, small business owners need to be able to focus on running and growing their businesses - not learning how to build and manage their websites.

But, a professional website with fresh and up-to-date content is a must-have for small businesses to be successful. Yahoo Small Business Website Design Service provides an easy and affordable solution using the popular WordPress platform to help businesses stand out from their competitors.

A quality website provides a business with a professional image that will make prospects confident in your ability to service them. A website is also often the primary place prospects will look online for businesses like yours, so it’s essential to be able to control what is shown about your products and services. Websites also make it easier for your customers to find you -- by sharing hours, locations, products and services, support and more advanced features like appointment setting and quotes.

What Website Design Offers

YSB’s Website Design Service includes two offerings:

Standard: focused on delivering an elegant, professional site with all the functions most growing businesses need.

Premium: ideal for more sophisticated websites with advanced features and capabilities, including accepting reservations or appointments, issuing quotes, customer login and more frequent content refreshes.

Both offerings include SEO, reporting and regular content updates to support small business

owners with the tools they need to grow their online presence. All websites are optimized for mobile.

How to Get Started

To get started, Yahoo Small Business offers an easy step-by-step process that includes consultations with an expert designer to discuss your business’ brand and goals, along with how your new website can help you build your online presence while leaving you free to focus on growing your business.

Visit https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webdesign for more information.

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A progress report on Yahoo Small Business email  improvements

By Dilip Deshpande Product Manager

We’ve made some changes to improve the speed, security, and reliability of Yahoo Small Business email. While these updates will increase the value of this product for our customers, the changes also require business email users to update their accounts with a new log in.

We understand that your email account is an essential part of your business and even a temporary delay caused by having to create a new log in can be unsettling. We apologize for any confusion this may have created and are available to help if you are having issues with your account.   

Some of the improvements that come with this update include:

Speed and stability: We've made significant upgrades to our email servers to deliver even better performance and experience.

 Independent passwords: Your business email login will no longer be tied to your Yahoo ID. You can now reset your password at any time -- and if you have an email administrator set up, they can do it for you, too. As owner of a Yahoo Small Business account, you can easily reset the password using the administrative email control panel while employee users can contact the owner or business email administrator to get new passwords.

Yahoo Mail App: Now access your Yahoo Business Email using the Yahoo Mail App (available in the Apple App Store and Android PlayStore). All you need is the app and your business mail username and password to access your emails.

App Password: In order to increase security around external email clients that do not use our Yahoo branded sign-in page, you will now use app passwords to access email using Outlook or POP/IMAP email clients. Learn more about app password here.

New Mail Interface: Our new web mail interface is designed for business mail users and comes with loads of features. Watch the video for more info.

If you haven’t updated your business email account, now would be a great time to do so! This Help Page walks you through the update, and here is a guide on what to do next.

In the meantime, thank you to all the business mail customers who have already updated your accounts, and thanks as well for being a part of Yahoo Small Business. We’re honored to have earned your trust, and will continue working to keep it.

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Some hosting plan prices to increase

While some hosting providers have been busy increasing their annual prices, we’ve kept our hosting plan pricing steady for the past nine years while adding more features.

At some point, though, every business has to raise its prices. Effective immediately some web hosting plan prices will increase on new purchases.  For existing customers, the price changes to affected plan renewals will begin on June 1, 2019. Our plans continue to deliver a substantial value at a reasonable price--something you’ve come to expect from Yahoo Small Business.

Our hosting plans offer everything you need for a high-performing site, including:

Website building tools, domain, emails, and an SSL Certificate

Virtually unlimited storage and databases with backup and restore functions built in

An easy-to-use control panel to manage your website services as you grow

Experience you can rely on to help keep your site running smoothly and securely 24/7

Unlike some competitors, we don’t charge extra at renewal for your domain, email addresses, hosting, or SSL certificate.

You can learn more about our three website hosting plans here.

© 2019 Verizon

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Celebrate early with a treat for your small business

The holidays are in full swing and there’s no better time to treat yourself to 30% off on website and business mail products that can help you launch your own small business before the new year.

These savings are available from Yahoo Small Business for 5 days only, Nov. 23-27, and are sure to put some holiday cheer into your plans to increase the online visibility for your business or to create a website to share your passions and ideas.

The 30% discount can be applied to Website Builder, Web Hosting, Stores, and Business Mail. To receive this sleigh full of savings, enter the code TREATYOURSELF at checkout.

From 11/23/2018- 11/27/2018, Coupon code TREATYOURSELF valid for 30% off new subscriptions of Web Hosting, Websites, Stores and Business Mail. 30% applied to total subscription term (monthly, annually, 2 3, or 5 yr.). Contract req’d, in which case you may cancel the service for any reason within 30 days of activation for a refund. Upon expiration of the contract term, payment provided will automatically be charged market rate plus taxes & fees. Not valid for Localworks and Domains products. Cannot be combined with other offers. Must purchase at Yahoo Small Business website. Offer subject to change at any time. Other terms apply. 

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It’s now free to launch and build a business online with Website Builder Starter

By Ramesh Padmanabhan Product Manager, Hosting and Website Builder Yahoo Small Business

Today Yahoo Small Business introduced a Starter plan for our Website Builder product that allows users to build a website and publish it for free when you sign up for an account.*

This is truly a free plan, with no payment required after a free trial or when it’s published and shared with the world. We have also removed any requirements for the user to provide a credit card. So we are now able to offer a free opportunity for people to start a businesses or share hobbies they love, or just express themselves online.

Users  of the Starter plan will be able to pick an available subdomain of their choice on ‘yahoosites.com’. The site they create will then be published to this subdomain. Free sites will also include a small Yahoo mention in the footer of published pages.

Small Business Owners wanting to remove the footer note or publish their site to an entirely customer domain name (such as “businessname.ninja”) can upgrade to either our Basic or Professional plans. To help make upgrading even more affordable, we have reduced the price by 30% for the Basic plan, which offers a custom domain name, email, and access to Live Insights analytics The Professional plan, which offers all the features of the Basic plan, plus a popular privacy feature known as Private Domain Registration is also now priced lower.

For more information on the new Starter plan or to build your own free site, visit https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/

Stay tuned as Yahoo Small Business continues to bring innovation and affordability to the website building space.

*Account creation required for free website, which will use a yahoosites.com domain name and have 3GB storage. Other terms apply.

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Yahoo Small Business launches improved Localworks for small businesses

By Dilip Deshpande Yahoo Small Business, Product Manager

We’ve updated our Localworks product that allows businesses to build and control their local online digital presence. Localworks is not just a paid business listing service -- it also comes with pack of features to help you gain a competitive edge in the current market.

With three different plans, users can choose the package that fits their business needs. Updating listings information in the Yahoo Local website directory has never been this easy. With Localworks Starter packages that include Yahoo Local and six other essential directory listing sites, your business information will be updated in real-time. As a business owner, you will have full control of your business information, and you will be able to upload enhanced listing content such as a photo gallery, videos, calendar of special events, and promotions. You will also get access to our “Digital Assistant”, a text bot that will assist you in updating your hours of operation, adding photos, and many other items using your mobile phone. The starter package also offers robust analytics to track your business performance, all at a very affordable cost.

With nearly 60% of searches happening on mobile devices, millions of users are looking for business addresses and phone numbers, hours of operation, driving directions, menus, photo galleries, and reviews before they make a visit to the physical location of a business. As a business, if your listing information does not include this enhanced content, or if you are not monitoring your business reputation, you might be losing customers.

For businesses that want to control their business information across most of the local directories on the Internet and closely monitor user reviews, understand user sentiment and how they compete in local search, Localworks by Yahoo Small Business is a comprehensive solution.

With our higher end packages, in a single dashboard, businesses can

Publish business listings in 60+ directories (Including maps, GPS, social media sites)

Eliminate duplicate business records appearing in the Local Search ecosystem

Connect to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter

Monitor and reply to user reviews from all major review sources

Compare with 5 other competitors (local or national)

Generate reviews through our website widgets

Understand customer reviews with Sentiment Analysis

Receive In-depth analytics

Yahoo Small Business also offers a free business listing scan tool, where businesses can easily find out how their information is listed across 60+ directories and clearly identify errors in location data across local listing networks before signing up for a premium Localworks service.

About Yahoo Small Business For the past 20 years, Yahoo Small Business has helped millions of businesses get online and grow their presence on the Internet. Whether you hope to start a side business or are currently running a multi-million dollar venture, you can trust Yahoo’s proven online business experience, powerful yet easy-to-use solutions, and broad community support to help your business succeed online. Learn more at: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com

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Domain registration now includes a professional website and business mail

Registering a domain name for your new business is a great first step to launching your online presence. But until now, it didn’t do much to help you find new customers or make money. Yahoo Small Business has made domain name registration an actionable product that now allows you to extend your business across the internet and create a professional image with both a web page and a custom branded email address.

Having a professional website and email address that are tied to your new domain name gives you all you need to launch your business online and start finding new customers. And Yahoo Small Business now offers this package for the price of just a domain name registration.

Beautiful Website

Your new One Page Website is the easiest way to build a beautiful and professional website for your business, hobby or personal project. Select from more than 150 beautiful themes that provide a consistent, professional experience whether viewed on mobile devices, tablets or computers. Your page can contain as many as 4 sections, including contact and location information; directions and maps; lists of services or menus; a portfolio, blog and videos, even a calendar for booking appointments or reserving a table. The website is available for free

Business Mail

Including a free professional email account powered by Yahoo Mail with your domain registration means you can immediately start using a branded and memorable email address for all your business messaging and communication. Having a [email protected] email address communicates your commitment to your business and can set you apart from someone who is just dabbling with the idea of starting a business and is still using a generic email address.

Additional tools and features built in to this product include:

Access to 150+ website templates

Unlimited bandwidth

Built-in SEO

24/7 phone, chat and online support

Live Insights included

30-day satisfaction guarantee

For some sole proprietorships, small businesses and projects, this package of three professional products may be all you need to get online and start running your business. But if as you grow, you find that you need a larger website or more mailboxes, they can be easily added without losing your existing website or email history.

Registering a domain name is often the first step in launching a business, so make it meaningful one by ensuring it includes a website and business mail, jumpstarting your efforts to get online and start promoting yourself across the web. Find your perfect domain name now.

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What a week we had at IRCE 2018 in Chicago!

By Kushagra Shrivastava Yahoo Small Business, Senior Director

It was great being at IRCE 2018! We came back energized to make things happen and we look forward to collaborating with merchants, partners and developers we met at the event.

The response we got at IRCE was resoundingly positive and our team is now even more excited to provide you with the ecommerce tools, access and resources you need to grow your business.

As we briefly touched upon at IRCE, we at Yahoo Small Business have been hard to work to increase our velocity by doubling down on our investments in our business, including increasing the size of engineering and product orgs by 2X and deploying capital behind our go to market strategy and marketing. These efforts are complemented by strong alignment with Verizon, who has championed small businesses since inception. With Verizon, we have a unique opportunity ahead of us and we look forward to work with you. Our merchants and our developers have been our biggest supporters and together with you we’ll increase velocity and efforts to do a lot more.

Watch for future updates on additional product releases, customer events, and new integrations. In the meantime, thank you for your ongoing support and overwhelming response at IRCE in Chicago.

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Join Yahoo Small Business at IRCE 2018 in Chicago

By Dan Breeden Marketing & Communications

The Internet Retailer Conference & Expo (IRCE) is June 5-8, 2018 in Chicago and Yahoo Small Business is looking forward to a week of industry updates, educational sessions, and the opportunity to meet with some of our top customers and partners.

As is the past, Yahoo Small Business will have a big presence on the expo floor at Booth #407 (just to the right inside the main entrance on the right side of the event registration desk). This year we’re excited to be able to celebrate you, our customers, by featuring several merchants in our booth to share their stories and insights. They will also be giving away select merchandise from their own stores -- and of course we’ll have lots of Yahoo Small Business branded tchotchkes to hand out to folks who stop by our booth.

The Yahoo Small Business team will also be meeting with customers, providing updates on our latest products and plans, and continuing with our mission to help online sellers succeed. We’ll be joined in the booth by several of our top developers, so stop by for an introduction or to discuss any plans you may have for improving your store.

If you haven’t been before, IRCE includes an exposition with more than 600 exhibitors, as well as four days and 130 conference sessions for sharing ideas and discussing state-of-the-art ecommerce technologies.

Alongside IRCE, existing Yahoo Small Business customers and partners are also invited to a party at a downtown restaurant the evening of June 6. All ecommerce customers should have received an invite, but if you didn’t get yours, please write your account manager. You don’t want to miss it.

See you in Chicago!

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Braintree payment processing now available on Yahoo ecommerce sites

Yahoo Small Business has partnered with PayPal to make Braintree payment processing available to online sellers using the Merchant Solutions and Yahoo Stores platform.

Braintree extends the merchant services options available for Yahoo Small Business customers looking for a way to process customer payments and have the funds available in their merchant account.

Braintree offers a seamless online checkout experience, as well as sophisticated fraud tools that helps online merchants manage risk.

Choosing Braintree allows Yahoo Small Business ecommerce customers to get paid with credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal, with multiple settlement options. In most cases, merchants will also have access to payouts within two business days of transactions.

Adding Braintree to your Yahoo Store is simple. The following guide walks through the steps for activating your Braintree payment processing. For more information on how to build a professional ecommerce site and start selling online, visit Yahoo Small Business.

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New website leads off the next 20 years of helping you succeed

By Ridhima Khurana, Product Manager; Wesley Budziwojski, Engineering Architect

Every day, millions of ideas get turned into businesses, employees become their own bosses, and dreamers become business owners. It was in this spirit that we started Yahoo Small Business two decades ago.

Today we launch a new Yahoo Small Business website that celebrates the success of small business owners who have joined us over the last two decades. Visitors to our new site, https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com, will find a sleek, modern, and intuitive design that inspires you to build a business and makes it simple to get started.

In the last 20 years, a lot has changed, except for our unwavering focus on helping small business owners start and grow their businesses. Chelsea Duckham, Chief Operating Officer of Pillows.com, profiled on the new site, said, “Our store has been on the platform for over 10 years and it continues to improve year after year with new features that facilitate our growth."

If you have your own success story to share or have feedback on our new site, connect with us on Facebook or in Community.

This is just the start. We are working hard to make our products work better for you. Watch this space for more exciting updates.

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Launch your mobile-ready website for free

Website Builder is not only the easiest way to build a beautiful & professional website for your business, hobby or personal use, it’s now also free for the first month to use, test and create your site.

Even during the free month, Website Builder features the tools a small business needs to start establishing their online presence and attract new customers. This includes:

Free yahoosites.com web address

3 GB storage

150+ templates

Mobile-optimized website

Unlimited site pages

Unlimited bandwidth

Built-in SEO

24/7 phone, chat and online support

Live Insights included

30-day satisfaction guarantee

Website Builder makes it easy for anyone to create a beautiful website since no coding skills are required and the themes with customization capabilities help to save time. While it has all the features a user may need to create a personal or hobby website, its best potential is realized with business websites. A business owner can make simple changes such as adding new pages, blog, videos, images etc and more advanced changes such as adding business widgets for specific industries.

When you sign up and launch a new Website Builder Lite account, you pay nothing for the first month and can cancel at any time during the first 30 days. After that, you pay only $5 a month for a professional and secure website that looks beautiful on mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

Visit the Website Builder page to learn how easy, and inexpensive, it is to get your business online.

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10-day holiday sale on website, stores, email and more

Take up to 50% off on Yahoo Small Business Website Builder and Ecommerce

Give yourself the gift of launching a website or online store for half the price. You can also setup your local business listings, web hosting or business mail for 30% off.

To get these great discounts, visit Yahoo Small Business, select the product you need and use code BIGSALE at checkout.

But don’t delay because this offer ends Nov. 30, 2017.

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Free mobile-friendly starter page added to Yahoo Small Business domain registrations

Yahoo Small Business is today announcing the release of domain starter page, a free feature allowing the creation of a web page for every domain name registration.

Domain starter page may be all that some businesses need for their first online page. The starter page can contain as many as 4 sections, including contact and location information; directions and maps; lists of services or menus; a portfolio, blog and videos, even a calendar for booking appointments or reserving a table. All of that is available without having to purchase a separate web hosting product.

Free domain starter pages leverage the same powerful technology of Website Builder, the easy-to-use editor we launched earlier this year. Users can take advantage of more than 150 beautiful themes that provide a consistent, professional experience whether viewed on mobile devices, tablets or computers.

As always our customer care team is available 24/7 to answer any questions.

For more information about free domain starter page, visit our domains site offering a choice of of hundreds of domain extension.

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Website Builder adds widgets that open the door to go beyond a traditional website

Website Builder, a modern website building product that makes it easy for small businesses to create beautiful, professional web sites, is now even more powerful with 10 new solutions that allow publishing of music, easy display of PDFs, links to social sites, allowing online reservations, incorporating a PayPal donations button and more.

The new widgets allow small business owners to easily add functionality to their Yahoo Small Business Website Builder site. New functions include:

Taking donations: You can add a “Donate Now” button that allows customers and supporters to make a donation to your business or project, with transfer of funds securely managed by PayPal.

Display events and calendars, and take reservations: Google Calendar and countdown timer widgets make it simple to show customers information like class schedules, clinics and workshops. The timer can be used to countdown the days, hours and seconds to a special event, or the beginning or ending of a sale. Meanwhile, restaurants and cafes can add the OpenTable Reservation widget to allow customers to book ahead from their own laptop or mobile phone, making it easier to predict how busy you’ll be on a given day, as well as making it more convenient for customers to plan their night out.

Add dynamic and engaging content, and connect your web and social sites: A new PDF viewer allows PDF files to be viewed directly on the web site (so no need for customers to download the file or have view on their device); musicians and musically inclined can use SoundCloud so users can select and listen to songs, podcasts and other sound files; and the Twitter widget displays tweets from your Twitter account right on your website. Facebook Comments and Like widgets can also be added to encourage site visitors to “Like” and leave positive comments on your Facebook page, all without leaving your website.

Create your own custom function: A custom widget framework has been added to allow Website Builder users to drop their own code or use 3rd party APIs and services to build custom solutions. Users could include adding Yelp or Google online reviews to their page, showing the weather forecast for their local area, or practically anything else that you can dream up.

The new widgets represent a significant step forward to already robust set of tools and functions that are built into and included in the basic price for Website Builder. Visit the Website Builder site for more information, including the opportunity to try it for only $1 for the first month

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Update makes it easier for eCommerce merchants to manage sales

Today, we’re releasing an update to the eCommerce platform Order Manager, the interface that sellers use to manage their online stores, that makes it simpler for sellers to review new sales, stay abreast of shipping and fulfillment, and review data to find additional opportunities. On top of that, the Order Manager is now mobile ready – so store owners can check in on their sales from their mobile phones while on the go.

New features added to Order Manager include:

Quickly view new, unshipped, unpaid orders: Sellers now have an immediate view of essential items; such as new orders, orders that need to be shipped, and orders that have been received but where payment is pending and may require customer contact.

Mobile ready: The interface is optimized to be used by mobile devices so sellers can check vital store information from their phones and tablets. You can even ship using your phone.

User-friendly redesign: Information has been reformatted to make it easier to access.

Advanced order export: Search time has been improved and now allows orders to be filtered by date range, shipping and billing addresses, state, zip and other fields.

No limits on order export: There is no longer a limit to how many orders can be exported, plus you can now choose to merge all order data into a single table.

Additional fields indexed: You can now gather, sort, and export customer and order records by a broader range of indexed fields, such as shipping carrier, product code, and item ID.

Auto-suggest: The interface now provides auto-suggest in all search fields, making it even faster to get the data you need.

The Order Manager update has been rolled out to all eCommerce customers. This release is part of several updates being made to the platform, which has supported more than $70 billion in sales for online retailers.

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Undo feature added to Website Builder

It just got easier and more fun to design a beautiful website with Yahoo Small Business Website Builder.

We’ve added an “undo” function so you can now quickly undo any number of changes you’ve made in the current browser window while designing your site. This makes it more fun to experiment with adding or replacing elements within the provided templates, and if you don’t like the result, simply click on “Show History” and you can undo and restore your previous design.

Design changes that can be easily undone include:

Deleting a section

Editing text

Editing elements within a section, including replacing or removing elements using Settings

Adding a divider

Moving a section up or down within the page

And even removing an item from a gallery

Providing more than 150+ templates, a mobile-optimized website, unlimited site pages and bandwidth, built-in SEO, 24/7 phone, chat and online support, and a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, Website Builder is a powerful, yet simple tool for creating a professional website for your business. And the undo feature gives you the flexibility to experiment and stretch your imagination when creating the perfect online site for your business.

For more information on the new undo feature, visit our Help pages or browse the Website Builder Index.