The joys and sorrows of Yahoo! Store
One of the quickest ways to get a web store up and running is to use Yahoo! Store - or as it is now called Yahoo! Small Business Merchant Solutions. They have very decent, web-based software for entering catalog items, managing sales, accepting credit cards, and all the other minor things that are necessary to sell things online. Their statistics are also top-notch.
But goodness gracious – their support stinks! I have recommended several customers and friends to Yahoo, but every single support incident I’ve been sucked into with them has been abysmal. I find that I always have to lead them through the support incident when it should be the other way around. When I point out their errors, they never even apologize; they just make excuses – or ignore their mistakes altogether.
Here’s a recent email exchange that took place over five days:
Me: (paraphrasing what I entered into a web form) After switching from your old system to your new system, the new email isn’t working - it still points to the old email.
Clayton from Yahoo Support: “I understand that you have a few [sic] small business email account setup, but the emails are still forwarding through your Yahoo! Store. I would recommend, that if the Yahoo! Store still has the email forwards setup, to go into your Yahoo! Store and remove the forwards. That way, when any email is sent to your business email address, it will route it to the correct web mail inbox with your merchant account.”
Me: “I’ll give that a shot over the weekend, but that doesn’t seem intuitive to me. I would understand that if I have (for example) sales@aaa.com set up in both places why the Store one would take precedence. But NO emails at the small business email accounts are working. If pfoley@aaa.com ONLY exists on small business, not on Yahoo Store, I don’t understand why mail to it gets bounced. I hope you are right - it just doesn’t seem logical to me. My concern is that I’m going to lose emails if I delete the forwards, because then nothing will work. We’ll see.”
Clayton from Yahoo Support: (no response)
Me: (three days later) “Unfortunately, I was right. Your suggestion didn’t work. I removed all the forwards from Yahoo! Store 24 hours ago - meaning that [the domain] is now not receiving ANY emails, a serious business problem. This did not resolve the issue, and I still don’t understand why you would even think it would.
“This is clearly an MX record problem. You have multiple servers that handle mail at yahoo - somebody who actually knows what an MX record is needs to point [the domain] to the right one (the new one - the “small business merchant” one). Please handle this as quickly as possible and confirm with me that it is done.”
Clayton from Yahoo Support: “I understand that you are not receiving your emails now. Since removing the Email forwards from the Store, in order for the emails to now redirect to your small business email account, you must have the name servers point to the Yahoo! hosting name servers. Simply contact your domain registrar, and request to have the name servers changed to:
[dns servers]
“Once the domain name has the new name servers, you should receive mail to your business mail accounts shortly after the change. “
I particularly love how he simply continues the instructions in the last email as if removing the email forwards were part of the correct process! “I understand that you are not receiving your emails now. Good. NOW all you need to do is …”
As I pointed out to him, this is an MX record problem (part of DNS). Removing the forwards has absolutely nothing to do with making this work, yet the support guy never owned up to his error. In fact, the correct procedure for upgrading an older Yahoo! Store to a Yahoo! Small Business Merchant Services account involves changing the DNS record as the last step – yet they only provided me with the correct values after a five day support exchange. Yeesh.
Granted, I was a tad snippy, but this kind of support is unacceptable. He had me try something patently wrong that brought email down for 24 hours. This customer uses the Internet for only a tiny percentage of their sales and communications, so they were willing to “give it a shot”. If Yahoo had given me the correct information in the first place, there would have been no interruption in service. It’s annoying, uncomfortable, and expensive for me to have to explain to a support person why they are wrong and ask for somebody better just to solve a basic issue like this without a service interruption.
I’m amazed that a company can be so good at creating software and so bad at supporting it. Long-term, this can’t be good for Yahoo!’s health.