Yahoo (YHOO) is following other tech companies recently to engage small businesses with the announcement that its revamped its online, e-commerce initiative, called Yahoo Stores.
The California company is liking trying to drum up additional sources of revenue with the new feature, having acquired mobile ad company Flurry in July.
Along with its current offerings for small businesses, including web hosting, domain names and website templates, the e-commerce platform touts itself as a way for business owners to start selling their wares within minutes. With the non-tech savvy in mind, the new product features an automatic mobile setup, along with the ability to pay Yahoo to create the small business’s online marketing. Web analytics are part of the package, too.
“Within a minute or two we (are) able to create a store and set up credit card payments,” said Amit Kumar, head of Yahoo Small Business, in a Thursday blog post. “Yahoo Small Business is for anyone with an idea, and with Yahoo Stores we’re making it even easier to turn those ideas into successful businesses.”
“Yahoo Small Business took the best of everything we’ve learned from our million+ customers over the past 16 years, and applied it to Yahoo Stores to give small-business owners a more powerful, streamlined and beautiful way to turn their ideas into a business,” he added.
The announcement from Yahoo comes a day after Amazon announced its own initiative to aid small businesses, called Local Register. The feature is a secure card reader and mobile app that allows owners to accept credit cards and debit cards more easily.
Even earlier in the week, Square, the mobile payment startup founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, announced an online scheduling feature to help small businesses.
The focus on e-commerce and small business is part of a larger trend of companies jockeying to take a piece of the market, like startup Bigcommerce, which Coins2Day recently profiled.