Congrats, Amit!<p>I met Amit at Yahoo (he was in Search; his Outlook entry read "Amit (Web Search) Kumar" and I still think of that sort of like his middle name.<p>He founded Lexity, which Yahoo acquired, and he's moved up since.<p>I was an investor in Lexity, mainly because Amit was able to actually ship things at Yahoo. It bodes well for him and their future.<p>PS - It's amazing how pointlessly hypercritical and condescending HN has become. Are you really saying they can't relaunch a product that they acquired once?
I worked in the Yahoo Stores team between 2005-2008. At that time it was known as Yahoo Merchant Solutions. Most of the features they've mentioned in today's announcement were already present back then. And yes, this is the same PG's viaweb.
Yahoo is a perfect example of a company that has had its foot in basically every great opportunity on the web. And yet, it sucks at basically all of them.<p>The best thing to have happened to the Internet is Yahoo being priced out of acquiring Google and Facebook during their early stages. Its pretty clear what would have been made of them under Yahoo's roof.
Major sticker shock after clicking the 'Create your store' button—they drop you into an order screen with 1 year of the 'pro' plan selected for $828. Caught me very off guard. No free trial? I'd love to kick the tires before they try to get me to pay for a year up front.
"Turn Your Idea Into a Business in Less Than 2 Minutes"<p>GoDaddy also has an ecommerce website builder (and like Yahoo it isn't easy enough to compete with Weebly or robust enough to touch Shopify).<p>But what's interesting is that GoDaddy advertises itself the same way as Yahoo does here. GoDaddy always has slogans like: "Get Up And Running In 5 Minutes!"<p>I've asked people internal at GoDaddy about this and they've said this is what their users always say they want. So I bet Yahoo has run similar surveys and had similiar conclusions: people want to build websites in 5 minutes.<p>The problem is obvious. Any website worth building will take much longer than 2 minutes to make. It strikes me as a bit of a tone-deaf marketing slogan.
Are online stores as simple as blog + inventory + accepting credit cards?<p>I don't mean the platform is simple. Or that implementing a store builder is simple. But the concept and the interface from the end user (store owner) point of view. Basically, if you can create a Tumbler or Wordpress blog and have a list of products, can you have a store?<p>It would seem so.<p>Pretty amazing how tech can remove frictions. And yet my cable box still uses as much electricity as my fridge and the remote has more buttons that a small plane.
Timing is interestingly close to Amazon Local Register launch from yesterday.<p>It's not clear from the website what the fees for payments are.<p>From the screenshot it reads "When you get your first order, we'll ask a few more details to complete the setup."
Has anyone had any experience with Amazon Web Store? Although I haven't tried it myself, one of the most appealing things about it is that the customer can use their amazon account and if you opt for the fulfillment by Amazon option (which is a different optional service), your customers can use their prime shipping account to get free two day shipping and Amazon takes care of the entire shipping process. Sounds like a killer feature but I was just wondering if anyone had any real experience with it.
The criticism here is funny! You need to keep a few things in mind. Yahoo has a HUGE small business audience. Most of that audience isn't anywhere near as technical as most people here. They don't give a shit about the technology behind the curtain. They also don't give a shit about how trendy it is. They just want it to work and to them, Yahoo is a trustworthy partner.
How does PG feel about this? I don't mean in a theoretical, reporter-seeking-a-quick-headline kinda way.<p>I mean, as someone that literally built something from scratch that was acquired by a tech giant some 15+ years ago....to have them still see how important an acquisition it was to them, that 15+ years later (which is like 200 years in Internet Time) they have re-invested in this same property and just relaunched it.<p>On some level this mean feel good...yes? But what are the other things you feel as both an inventor and entrepreneur when you see this?<p>The reason I ask is because for me, I haven't done anywhere near that level...but the little fitness product that I created that is helping people lose weight and change their lives...hearing those stories still gives me goosebumps and chills.<p>So I imagine this, considering that many acquisitions nowadays end up with the acquired company/project just killed off, must be a whole other set of emotions and feelings all wrapped up in one.<p>Would love to hear his perspective on that.
Wow... they should have released this ages ago and participated in the renaissance brought on by Shopify/Squarespace et al.<p>As others have said, they're in lots of businesses and this looks like another half-baked example of too little, too late. Still, they'll probably make some money transitioning legacy clients to the more expensive platform.
Service looks incredibly dated and the pricing is all out of whack.<p>The whole "in 2 minutes" thing never resonates with me. To me it implies a crappy service. Anything (sizable; like, oh, say, going into business) doable in 2 minutes is NOT worth doing.
Seeing this announced on a tumblr is pretty jarring. I have no expectation that a tumblr post will be substantial like that.<p>(google's official blog being on blogspot is kind of the same way, though.)
Funnily, besides the "sticker shock" comment, there's not any other comment I found insightful in this post (including mine, but it's a meta-comment).<p>People reminiscing about ViaWeb, other's name-calling Yahoo, asking if it's "written in Perl", etc...