Yahoo’s Aabaco Small Business Review: Create an Ecommerce Store from Scratch Seemingly Overnight

With Yahoo's Aabaco Small Business, you can create an ecommerce store from scratch seemingly overnight. The small business solution is marketed as a platform where you can build a website, start selling online and effectively market your products.

Furthermore, the pre-packaged ecommerce tools that are included are billed as easy to use with powerful features.

Yahoo's Aabaco Small Business Features

Adding Products is Insanely Easy

If you've ever walked through the setup process in BigCommerce or Shopify, you know it's become much easier to understand what you need to do next when building a website. Yahoo's Aabaco Small Business makes it even more rudimentary. Once you land on the dashboard, they provide the exact steps you need to follow in order to get your site configured. The product creation tutorial is also right there for quickly launching your store with the products you want to sell.

Overall, I would say this is the ultimate interface for the beginning web designer. While they do seem to have a few spots to insert some custom coding, in general I wouldn't find this platform all that friendly for more advanced users. The whole point of it is to get your products up on your ecommerce storefront quickly and in a professional format.

Clean Templates That Do The Job

All of the Aabaco Small Business templates are clean and modern. They tend to look the same regardless of the niche, but overall they get the job done. Once again, it's clear that Yahoo is trying to make the process simple for less experienced users. You're supposed to choose a template that suits your brand and not make many changes to it. For example, the majority of the templates I looked at had large header images. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but you can't really get rid of them if you want something smaller.

Support for Some Great Payment Forms and Shipping Methods

All major credit cards and PayPal are accepted, and you can also choose from payment gateways such as Stripe, Dwolla and Authorize.net.

The primary shipping method is through UPS. Although I don't like the idea of having no other shipping options, this does simplify printing out labels, managing pricing and understanding how long it's going to take to ship your packages.

A Decent App Gallery

The Yahoo App Gallery is a double-edged sword. They have over 30 apps that are quality products, but they seem to try and market the ones that are made by Yahoo or one of its subsidiaries. This sounds pretty good in terms of integrating with the whole platform, but I'm hoping that the apps aren't only placed in the gallery because of that. I know of some rather impressive third party apps that are great for live website insights, but Yahoo created their own and features those in the gallery.

The apps are fine overall from what I’ve seen, but I tend to prefer stores where the apps are made by other developers, giving you a more expansive selection and a better chance of finding the highest quality options.

Yahoo's Aabaco Small Business Pricing

Website hosting, local marketing and domains are all sold through this platform. Each of these have their own pricing structures, but we're only going to look at the three plans for building your own ecommerce site. At the time of this article, the company has a limited-time offer of only $14 per month for something they call a Lite Plan. I'm not entirely sure whether this is a unique plan or simply a way they market one of their permanent plans, but be sure to check it out if you're looking for a more affordable solution. Anyway, the following plans are the primary ones:

• Basic – For $29 per month you receive 10 email accounts, a transaction fee of 1.50%, a mobile storefront, 30+ apps, SEO tools, social media support, Live Insights, PayPal support, live chat support, a Live Store badge, 24/7 customer support and bulk importing and exporting.
• Professional – For $79 per month you receive 30 email accounts, a transaction fee of 1%, everything in the previous plan and API access for third party solutions.
• Premier – For $299 per month you receive 1,000 email accounts, a transaction fee of 0.75%, everything in the previous plan, priority phone support and a designated account manager.

Each plan includes an unlimited number of products, storage space, bandwidth and a free domain name.

Overall, the pricing seems reasonable. I like the fact that they give you unlimited products and storage with all accounts, and it's nice to see that the Lite plan is at least available for some period of time. I’m assuming that most small businesses would go with the Basic plan, but that 1.50% transaction fee is not exactly what I would call appealing.

Yahoo's Aabaco Small Business Support

Support for an ecommerce store is always a concern for me, because at some point you’ll want to speak with someone about a problem you have. As you can see from the pricing, you gain access to 24/7 support with all plans, but the priority phone support isn’t included until you reach the Premier Plan. That's annoying, but many people just use email support anyway.

They don't seem to have a live chat box, which is generally my preferred method of contacting customer support, but the ticketing system is pretty smooth once you get past all the questions they ask you on the Support Page. Overall, it seems like they try to get you to solve your own problems using the knowledge base, so I wouldn't get my hopes up when trying to connect with representatives on a more personal level.

Who Should Be Using Yahoo's Aabaco Small Business?

From what I’ve seen, Aabaco Small Business is designed for the ultimate small business. If you’re only trying to sell a handful of products and don't want to dive into more complex tools such as WordPress, this is a decently priced ecommerce platform for you. Also, this one gives you unlimited products, which is a huge advantage compared to other beginner platforms.

Original Article written by Catalin Zorzini