The ecommerce store-hosting service formerly known as Yahoo Stores, aka Aabaco, published a refresher for storeowners on the new features it has added this year. More accurately, Yahoo’s Aabaco Small Business unit, which provides additional services in addition to its Stores platform, published the post.
We keyed in on two features that seemed especially significant for online merchants and asked Yahoo/Aabaco for more information. The first is a new site search – the announcement explained, “We’ve upgraded the Site Search feature to make your shoppers’ search results even more relevant and easier to navigate.”
A Yahoo spokesperson told EcommerceBytes, “The new Site Search indexes more product information fields, including headline and abstract. Searches conducted around keywords in those fields will now return relevant results. We’ve also greatly simplified the shopper experience when using the Category filter for search results. When the Category filter is shown, the search results page now displays a flat list of item categories. Before this change the shopper often had to select multiple filters to sort through results.”
Another change means that search results maintain a look and feel that’s more consistent with the rest of the merchant’s website, without the need for manual restyling.
The new Site Search was enabled for all users at the end of July.
The announcement also heralded Google Analytics integration – “The first step in improving your store’s performance is knowing how it performs right now. Google Analytics makes it easy to get this information – and we make it easy to activate Google Analytics for your store.”
We thought it curious that Aabaco would only add the popular Google Analytics in 2016. The Yahoo spokesperson explained, “Customers were always able to manually install Google Analytics, but in January, Aabaco Small Business announced Google Analytics as our new analytics tool. Prior to Google Analytics, customers had access to our former tool, Yahoo Web Analytics.”
As for what new features might be on the way, the Yahoo spokesperson said, “We typically don’t share new features before they’re announced, but we’re constantly working on new product enhancements for our customers.”
Yahoo recently agreed to sell its core operating business – including Aabaco Small Business – to Verizon.
