Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Yahoo! Games

On the Yahoo website, people can play games either individually or with others. Some of the games can be played online, while others require that you download them. Board games, card games, emulated arcade games, word games, and fantasy sports can all be found on Yahoo's game site. In addition, the site includes Yahoo Games on Demand. This is a program that allows you to demo PC games and download their full versions for a charge.

Yahoo Games provides a great variety of entertaining applications. The ones that you can play directly from their website are typically quick Flash games or Java applets. According to the McAfee Site Adviser, there is TryMedia AdWare in many of their downloads. Apparently, Yahoo's game site users can pay extra to get an All Star user name. The All Star program disables pop-ups and allows the user to play games without seeing advertisements.

Some of the more popular games on Yahoo Games include:

WMC: Twice in a Blue Moon
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste
Word Search
Daily Crossword
Scrabble Journey
G.H.O.S.T. Chronicles
Diner Town Tycoon
Artist Colony
Text Twist
Word Racer
Addiction Solitaire
Black Jack Go Fish
Canasta
Pinochle
Hold 'em Poker
Bejeweled 2
An Assortment of Jigsaw Puzzles
Monopoly
Tradewinds 2
Tradewinds Legend

The Yahoo Games website is a little cluttered and can be confusing to new members. Although, once you get used to where everything is, it becomes a lot easier to navigate. Another thing that I found frustrating is that Yahoo advertises many of their games to be free, but some of them were only free for a brief trial period. Once that trial period is over, Yahoo will no longer permit you to play the game without paying a fee.

On the other hand, Yahoo Games is a great site for variety, providing over 400 options for entertainment. In addition, they give reviews of the games, helping you to decide which ones are best. These reviews include news and previews of currently available and upcoming games. Yahoo Games is one of the leading game sites on the internet today.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions

Yahoo!Merchant Solutions are designed for a business of almost any size. The maximum number of products that you can sell is 50,000, which accommodates most business needs. They offer three different plans that you can choose from including The Starter Plan, The Standard Plan, and The Professional Plan. One of the nice things about the different sized plans is that as your business grows, it is easy to upgrade at anytime. Yahoo! Merchant Solutions offers many services in terms of accepting credit cards and fraud protection, cross selling, gift certificates, real time integration with back end systems, notification of new orders, web analytics, the ability to export to Quickbooks, and tools for Marketing your website.

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions requires that you have a merchant account, either with FirstData, the company that they have ties with, or another company of your choice. Yahoo offers credit card verification tool and the ability to accept credit cards offline. They also offer a variety of ways by which you can take payments and have taken several measures to control fraud.

Some of the business marketing tools offered by Yahoo! Merchant Solutions include the ability to increase sales by suggesting related products, or cross selling, and increase your customer base by producing gift certificates and receiving them as a form of payment. Cross selling means that if someone is buying an item, the store will automatically suggest a related item for purchase. An example of this is a customer purchasing a TaylorMade R9 driver and being offered a matching Ping golf bag on the same screen. It is a highly effective marketing tool. In addition, gift certificates are often purchased in bulk by large companies looking for a gift idea and can dramatically increase sales by driving new traffic to your location.

The real time integration feature that is offered by Yahoo! Merchant Solutions means that you can automatically check your inventory for a product and calculate sales tax and shipping. This means that your customers will know exactly what they are getting and how much it will cost them at the time of purchase. It also means that you will never have to refund a customer after later finding that an item is out of stock.

In addition, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions allows you to receive orders various ways including, online, by email, or by fax. They export all of your sales information into Quickbooks for you. Plus, they are integrated with UPS WorldShip, which saves you time. All of your shipping information is automatically entered, so you won't have to retype names and addresses. This cuts down the possibility of errors and lost business. Of course, you are free to use whatever shipping method works best for you and preset all of your own specified shipping expenses, including price by weight, international shipping fees, etc.

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions provides great marketing tools such as real time information about your customers shopping. They give specific details in terms of what products are most searched for and during what part of a sale are customers abandoning their shopping carts. Their sales analytics not only show you what is going on with your business, but guide you as to how to fix problems. In addition, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions is product of Yahoo, one of the biggest search engines on the internet. They offer visibility to their customer, automatically submit your information to multiple search engines, and even provide credit towards additional advertising.

Not all of the Yahoo Merchant Solution plans include every feature that has been mentioned. Plus, there have been some harsh reviews about their services not being consistent. However, Yahoo Merchant Solutions is the #1 provider of eCommerce hosting in the world and should be considered as an option if you are operating a business online.

Yahoo Merchant Solutions!!!