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It is my belief that Yahoo had been lagging in leadership and innovation for too long. It reigned as king of Internet services for a while. But like so many other companies that eventually diminished, Yahoo became a purely profit-driven company instead of being consumer-, innovation- and technology-driven. It bought several companies to help boost its bottom line, but failed to truly harness their potentials as useful technologies that could make a difference.

The Beginning of A Dynasty
Entered Google. The latest big thing in business and technology. A few years after Google introduced its search engine with deadly accuracy, pure speed and glowing simplicity (v.s. Yahoo’s busy portal and ad-infested results). Being a technology and innovation driven company, Google did not stop there; it went on to radically redefine the way web services are used and integrated. Take for example, compare the aging Yahoo Map to Google’s stunning and innovative Google Map. I simply don’t see how Yahoo could (or would) EVER create anything even remotely close to the power of Google Maps. Satellite view from Yahoo? Forget about it. Web-based maps would never have been the same without Google.

Gmail Changes Everything
Now take another look at Google’s Google Gmail system. Nobody had even considered offering huge free email accounts in a database online until Gmail. The notion that having 1+ GB of free email space was simply absurd at the time. Both Yahoo and Hotmail had just begun charging their customers for premium services for up to 200MB of email space. Not to be outdone, Yahoo immediately introduced its plans to upgrade all its free and premium customers to match that of Gmail’s offering.

Too little, too late. Gmail started to experiment with giving 2GB of storage space. And before Yahoo could even react, Gmail decided, what the heck, why not increase the storage for ALL of its users by a small fraction every second — forever. And Yahoo’s strategy? None yet. Microsoft quietly upgraded their storage capacity as well, not bothering to make a big deal out of it. After all, email service is not its core business. With its monopoly, Microsoft will probably find ways to crush Google with the help of the Republican leadership.

Yahoo Battles for Survival
To Yahoo’s credit, they did find and bought out a small and fast growing online email client, Oddpost. Oddpost (only available on IE-compatible browsers on Windows) had probably the most advanced online interface almost mirroring that of Microsoft Outlook Express. A lot of heavy DHTML on the interface.

But what happened to Oddpost after almost two years? Nada. No integration of its technology into the boring Yahoo Mail interface. But Yahoo has millions of users; its market size is not going to shrink significantly…. for now.

Expect More from Google
There are so many great technologies on the horizen from Google. Just check out its Google Labs and imagine how these services can benfit your life. Instead of keeping emerging technologies secret, Google welcomes early adapters to chew on, spit on, kick around and take its latest hacks for a test drive. As for Yahoo, I haven’t seen any noticeable innovation coming out of them in years. The last big splash was the revamping of its home page a few years ago with glitzy graphics and colors.

Long live Google with all your innovations.
Yahoo — catch up, innovate or die.

Google, when are you going to get into ecommerce hosing business now that you seem to be getting into the game of ecommerce transactions? I can’t wait to see what kind of tricks you have in your bags to show Yahoo how it’s really done.

My issues with Yahoo continues from the last article.

My second challenge had to do with the way Yahoo displays its pages. On its legacy stores, Yahoo uses a proprietary scripting language (RTML; I don’t really care what it stands for) to render HTML. And every single one of these pages are pre-generated as static pages. This may not be a bad idea since dynamic pages would increase Yahoo’s server load significantly being that Yahoo is probably THE biggest ecommerce solutions hosting company.

That’s all good and dandy. But what I was going after was to access its shopping cart technology without using Yahoo’s catalog database OR its awkward RTML scripting language. So I spent sometime to work around it using PHP and MySQL. This was when shit hit the fan… again.

First of all, I couldn’t really use MySQL to store catalog items. In order to use Yahoo’s shopping cart, I must utilize an unique Yahoo ID automatically generated by its catalog database. But to get this ID, I must create an item by using its catalog database.

Those of you who are programming literate must be thinking that I could just as easily take that Yahoo ID, store it in MySQL and continue a happy life with PHP. I wouldn’t be writing about this B.S. if life was that simple…

It turns out that, in order to save item attributes to the shopping cart, I’d need to use Yahoo’s proprietary “store tags”. And store tags, as Yahoo would have it, is NOT PHP friendly. These tags only work when a page is a static HTML page. As soon as you slap a working set of HTML codes into PHP, the store tags wouldn’t be able to find the shopping cart to reference its content to. Now, I could probably set the path to Yahoo’s pre-determined shopping cart URL, but then I run the risk of having the whole thing working at the mercy of Yahoo keeping that URL working forever. Besides, that’s several sets of URLs I need to keep track of: one for images, another for shopping cart, yet another for item descriptions, and another for viewing the cart. That’s B.S.!

So PHP is out of the picture. Next is RTML. I looked over its specs and saw how the default page generated by Yahoo was coded, I basically just said, “Fu*k this. I am not going to waste time learning a scripting language that works only for Yahoo.”

I mean, com’on, Yahoo! Make some sense! Unless I own a business that specializes in coding RTML for poor souls whose businesses were misleadingly lured into Yahoo’s projected “easy of use” store front, there’s no way a sane individual is going to spend time to learn that B.S. language just to get a stupid template right.

And in case some of you wonder if Yahoo Store Editor is CSS-friendly. NO, it’s not. You can’t simply change its looks by fiddling with CSS. The fact is, unless you know RTML, there’s no way to modify the Yahoo template in any meaningful way.

Developing an ecommerce store for Yahoo’s Merchant Solutions should’ve been a pleasant task. But what I got myself into was a mess — and Yahoo knows it.

My friend’s online business has been using an older ecommerce system called “Yahoo Store”, now referred to by Yahoo as “Legacy Store”. The system included quite a few nice tools (click trails, visitor analysis… etc) for roughly $60/mon plus 1.5% + $0.30 per transaction charges. Not bad for a solid and secured shopping cart that just works.

After spending some time going through Yahoo’s documentation on its newer “Merchant Solutions” ecommerce suites, introduced last September, I thought the prices were great for the price ($100/mon plus 1% + $0.30 per transaction). So I suggested an upgrade to take advantage of the lower % rate (that alone would save him a few hundred dollars on a monthly basis) in addition to robust features (php, MySQL… etc) that I could use to help develop the site into a more dynamic and user friendly one. The objective was to boost buyer conversion.

Now, the store already has several hundred active items in Yahoo’s proprietary database. The store is active with tons of daily sales. I envisioned the transition from the its current design to my template in three or four phases to roll out one thing at a time. Or so I thought.

First, Yahoo tech support and sales (two separate calls) painted a rosey picture of the upgrade. Everything would transfer to the new system transparently, they implied. I have dealt with Yahoo before with happy results. Plus it’s a very reputable company with a startup spirit. Great! This is going to be fun!

What Yahoo’s tech support and ALL of its documentations failed to mention was, upgraded legacy sites would NOT operate quite the same way as described in those tutorials and documentations. Such careless detail, conveniently ignored by at least 3 tech supports I spoke to and countless documenations I read, caused store items to disappear, and thus unorderable by paying customers.

When I called Yahoo tech support and spoke to TWO different tech support people about the scenario (after numerous customer complaints on a Monday morning), they were BOTH well awared of the issue (they basically spoke my mind describing the problem better than I could), apologized profusely and basically acknowledged there was NOTHING Yahoo could do about it — that meant I’d have to manually catalog each and every one of the 500+ items that should’ve been there — BY HAND –> (create item object, name item, write item description, caption, create price) x 500.

WTF!!

The problem is related to Yahoo’s flawed design in how the data is referenced by its legacy stores. When the catalog was transferred to the new service, Yahoo’s documentation made no mention of how the newly created catalog database would be referenced by the legacy store. So when I logged in, I just saw a single table of 500+ items. All of its documentations, on the other hand, encouraged merchants to manipulate this database by creating custom tables and sub-catalogrize items accordingly for easy management by its own web-based management tools. The problem that’s not documented was, once an item is moved out of the default table into a differnt one, that item is forever lost in the eyes of the legacy store. Even if the item was restored to its original table that Yahoo created, legacy store still would not see it. And get this, THIS ONLY HAPPENS TO CUSTOMERS UPGRADING FROM LEGACY STORES. Talk about biting the hands that feed you! Fu*king Yahoo.

But after patiently, politely and persistently asking the second tech support to review ways to restore the table to its former state (which I KNOW for a fact Yahoo is capable of), he found someone who was able to do it in two minutes. And all was well again. I wonder what that “we can’t do anything about it” claim was all about. Fu*king Yahoo.

How can a company, with all its technological know-how, miss such fatal flaw in its design? Worst yet, if tech support is awared of the issue, how come it’s not documented accordingly for upgrade customers? And according to the tech supports I spoke to, this is an internally well-documented issue which their “publishing department refuses to include” in their external documentation. Both tech guys told me they get MANY calls every week about this problem.

Now, I wonder how Yahoo can stay in this business for long. Fu*king Yahoo.