The Best Yahoo Stores Alternative for Your Website
Choose the right eCommerce platform to start and grow your business
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Founded in 1994, Yahoo! is a massive provider of a wide variety of web services, from e-mail and search engine to hosting and forums. Their eCommerce platform, Yahoo! Stores, exists under their Yahoo Small Businesses division of web services. Much of their platform includes features adopted by Aabaco Small Business, which the company acquired previously. In 2017, Verizon Media acquired the Yahoo! company – the business has since stated that this acquisition will not affect stores currently run on their Yahoo! Stores platform. Yahoo!’s headquarters is in Sunnyvale, CA.
Shift4Shop is a feature-rich eCommerce platform serving businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries across the globe. Offering an unmatched free eCommerce solution, the company provides everything you need to start — and grow — your business. This turnkey eCommerce experience includes powerful tools to help businesses succeed — a robust website builder, product and order management, customer marketing tools, and more. Customers can choose from dozens of professionally designed, industry-specific templates, all of which are mobile-friendly, SEO optimized, and highly customizable.
Yahoo! is a huge brand, so it might seem logical that their online store package would be the best of the best. But that simply isn't true. Yahoo! may be a household name, but the company does so many things that their focus on eCommerce is weak at best. True, Yahoo! Stores has the required features to run an online store, but it pales in comparison to a platform released by a dedicated eCommerce provider. Sellers on Yahoo! Stores have to deal with limited features, lack of choices, and other stumbling blocks — not to mention extra transaction fees!
Shift4Shop, on the other hand, is a full-featured online store solution developed purely for eCommerce. You get far more features to help drive your success, better overall functionality, more real-time shipping options and payment providers, and much more. Plus, Shift4Shop has no transaction fees, ever.
Promotions and CouponsYahoo! Stores has no built-in coupon functionality, so you need to pay for a third-party app just to offer the coupons and promo codes central to enticing customers and increasing sales. But Shift4Shop comes with a versatile promotions module that lets you create all kinds of coupons and codes in minutes.
Accepting PaymentsYahoo! Stores offers very limited payment options, so you'll only be able to accept credit cards and PayPal. You may not even be able to use your existing merchant account, if you have one. Shift4Shop, however, comes with Shift4 Payments right out of the box, which takes only minutes to set up and allows you to accept credit cards as well as several alternate payment types. Dozens of other payment methods like PayPal are also available.
“I started my online store with Yahoo! because I knew the brand, but ended up disappointed. It was okay at first, but the more I learned about running an online business, the more I realized what was missing. It started feeling so limited. Switching to Shift4Shop felt like upgrading from a bicycle to a sports car.”
– Former Yahoo! Stores User
Shipping IntegrationsRetailers and customers alike rely on real-time shipping rates, label printing, and tracking number generation, but Yahoo! Stores only offers these features if you use UPS. With Shift4Shop, you'll have a choice of fully-integrated shipping carriers like UPS, FedEx, USPS, and more.
How do free Yahoo! Stores themes stack up against free Shift4Shop themes?
Both Yahoo! Stores and Shift4Shop offer free themes for use in building and starting your online store. But which selection is better? Let’s take a look.
Yahoo! Small Business’s website builder offers 36 themes to choose from that you can use to build your site. However, only a small few of these themes are designed for use with an online store or eCommerce site – most are better suited for virtual portfolios or restaurant homepages. Yahoo! also gives users the choice to start from a blank template, where you’ll need to add all of the page elements yourself if you’d prefer a blank slate. But only certain elements can be added freely to the site, forcing you to work within locked sections. Customization ends up feeling unnecessarily restrictive with this builder.
Shift4Shop offers merchants a wide selection of free themes that are all responsive, unique in design, and built specifically for eCommerce. Customization tools are comprehensive and easy to use, making it simple to change any aspect of your online store to fit your specific business needs. Built on the powerful Core Template Engine, Shift4Shop themes use an advanced Bootstrap framework that integrates optimized code structure, AMP for several types of site pages, AJAX, and more so that your online store loads fast and reliably. If you're familiar with HTML and CSS, you can also skip our built-in tools and work with code directly, since you'll have full access to theme files. You can even clone your theme to have a fresh copy to experiment with.
Shift4Shop knows what it takes to sell online. That's why our platform is packed with every feature you need to build and grow your business, from inventory management to marketing.
Yahoo! simply isn't focused on eCommerce, and Yahoo! Stores are missing vital features you need for marketing, managing customers, and preventing cart abandonment.
Yahoo! Stores is extremely limited in the payment providers it offers to their merchants. Due to their extensive partnership with PayPal, Yahoo! Stores can use PayPal payment methods and gateways like Braintree, Venmo, PayPal Credit, and more with PayPal Smart Payment Buttons. But even though PayPal integration is welcomed at every angle, Yahoo! Stores are missing support for other popular gateways like Shift4. You also can't accept alternate payment methods like digital wallets, which are extremely popular. This limitation on your business will turn customers away, since many people prefer paying with methods other than credit cards or PayPal. In contrast, Shift4Shop is powered by Shift4 Payments, which allows you to accept credit cards and several types of alternate payment methods (and in using Shift4, you can also access Shift4Shop's free, unlimited End-to-End eCommerce plan, which gives you pro-level eCommerce features at no monthly charge).
On top of the extreme limits on payment gateways, Yahoo! Stores charges transaction fees on every plan — regardless of how much you pay. On the most expensive Professional plan, transaction fees only go down to .75%. This means that you can be spending over $200 every month and still be paying a fee for every sale your store makes, which is something that Shift4Shop never does. You'll only pay the normal processing amount required by your payment provider.
Shift4Shop comes with Shift4 Payments built in, which enables you to start accepting credit cards and several alternate payment types within minutes. You can also add PayPal and other familiar methods to your online store. Check out a quick summary below or see a
full list of payment providers here.
Shift4Shop was developed with eCommerce in mind from the beginning, and our laser focus has gone into creating a shopping cart platform backed up by vast industry knowledge.
Try to do everything and you'll excel at nothing. Yahoo! Stores is just another small product of a massive company, created to meet demand — but it won't meet your needs.
