Yahoo Stores Gets An Overdue Facelift

Yahoo has completely redesigned its aging Yahoo Stores ecommerce platform in an effort to compete with Squarespace and Shopify. The company announced the refresh of its 16-year-old site on Thursday (Aug. 14).

The company says more than a million customers have used the small-business platform over its history, and claims the new version of the site “can have an online store up-and-running and accepting orders in less than a couple of minutes.”

The new Yahoo Stores “offers a seamless payment processing experience that is automatically PCI compliant,” along with automatic search engine optimization, an easier-to-use collection of storefront templates, tools for managing a Yahoo storefront through mobile devices, and real-time analytics for web and mobile, said Amit Kumar, head of Yahoo Small Business, in the announcement.

Most of the new features aren’t unique among Yahoo’s competitors, but the service’s new design “appears quite good on first look,” according to VentureBeat, which also described the previous design as “not for the aesthetically sensitive.”