Considerations for migrating from Yahoo! Store

We have a legacy Yahoo! Small Business that's been online for seven years, and are considering moving it to OpenCart. Here are the pros and cons I see initially:

Pros

• Save $99/month for hosting
• No more 1.5% revenue share with Yahoo!
• Save $40/month for Google Feed, Bing Feed, TheFind Feed, etc.
• Site needs to be redesigned anyway and is easy to do on OpenCart.
• Easier to do product updates.
• More flexibility.

Cons

• Concerns regarding current search engine listings. I know we can do a 301 redirect for all the pages that are indexed, but that will be somewhat of a project.
• Exporting products from YSM and importing into the new OpenCart store.
• We'll be responsible for maintaining the server. YSM currently takes care of all of that for us.
• More hands-on work to keep the site updated with features.
• Added responsibility of maintaining the feeds.

I'm sure I'll think of more, but that's a start. I'm curious to know if anyone else has migrated a store from Yahoo! Small Business. If so, please chime in. I'm particularly interested in learning more about any fallout regarding lost search engine listings, due to the change in URL structure, and how easy it is to manage multiple shopping feeds.

Never made such a move but your point:

We'll be responsible for maintaining the server. YSM currently takes care of all of that for us.

That shouldn't matter too much as most servies are managed and will sort out the setting up for you.

twiggy wrote:Never made such a move but your point:

We'll be responsible for maintaining the server. YSM currently takes care of all of that for us.

That shouldn't matter too much as most servies are managed and will sort out the setting up for you.

I agree.

I am considering the same thing. Learning and paying for RTML enhancements has been my pet peeve over the years. The server part should be relatively easy. SEO for your current rankings are what concerns me the most with over 250 pages, you probably have even more.

Another reason to migrate away from Yahoo is the lack of confidence I have with email. I just received an email from one of our suppliers that an email he had sent bounced back. There had been some missing email incidents in the past as well.

I'm strongly considering moving forward with the migration from Yahoo Store and have a couple of questions:

1. Is it difficult and/or time-consuming to set up a Google Product Feed on OpenCart?

2. We have over 1,400 products. Since the URL structure is changing, do I need to manually set up a 301 redirect for each URL?

@WebDev - We're considering migrating as well. Did you ever find answers to your two questions?

Hello WebDev22,

You can migrate your products from Yahoo to OpenCart directly without exporting-importing to a csv file. Check cart2cart site for details.
For a nice info about redirects check this article.

not to well known wit yahoo stores but did some investigation.

I suspect you can keep your existing domain name and move it to a new server.
if that is the case, it might take some work but all your urls can be reproduced in opencart even with .html at and.
so after migrating you should not lose any search engine listings.

google feed is easy just let google find it OC creates it on the fly.

maintaning your shop.
for what you now pay a month you can have exellent hosting with plenty features and domainname(s) for a year.
So you save a lot off money a year so you can find a experienced person to do these things for your or to educate you and still pay less.