Established in 1998, Yahoo! Store (also known as Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and Yahoo! Ecommerce) is a fully hosted ecommerce operation that provides merchants will all the tools they need to build, manage, and promote their stores. Yahoo hosts more than 45,000 online stores of varying sizes, including more of the top 500 Internet Retailer stores than any other hosted platform.
While Yahoo Store undoubtedly offers excellent support to the businesses it hosts, it is definitely more expensive than most of the competition. However, most of the businesses say that the quality of hosting support offered by Yahoo makes the extra cost worthwhile.
There are 3 plan levels ranging from $39.95 to $299.95. There is a $50 setup fee for all plans. Transaction fees range from 1.5% down to 0.75%. Compare Yahoo Store plans.
The biggest strength of Yahoo's ecommerce solution is the long experience and immense infrastructure of Yahoo. The long history of Yahoo Store means it has features smaller players haven't had time to develop -- the cross sell engine that examines customer history and viewing behavior to recommend pages of potential customer interest is one example.
Yahoo Store's biggest weakness is its insistence on using RTML, a proprietary template language. It is not as easy to access and work with as more common development languages. However, many of the merchants feel that the power and flexibility (and large developer network) make up for the headaches.