[aston]

Implicit suggestion here: That Yahoo's wasting their money.

Zimbra's a very mature product that's already making money. The company's also reasonably old. Compare that to Writely and Zenter, which were both purchased before large-scale release and while the companies were brand new. I think this is probably a pretty good buy for Yahoo.

[zandorg]

I think that with the figures Paul Graham gave us on Yahoo Store, that acquisition payed for itself around 2 years ago.

[pg]

All I know is what their revenues were. I don't know their costs, so I can't guess how long it took to pay for itself.

[ratsbane]

At the first Startup School in Boston someone mentioned that Yahoo Store had about 235,000 stores and $5 billion/year in store revenue, if I'm remembering correctly. The smallest available monthly fee(1) is currently $40 and the smallest transaction fee is 0.75% thus their annual revenue must be greater than (235000 x 40)+($5 billion x 0.75%)=$46.9 million. I'm guessing it's rather a bit more than that.

1) http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/plans.php

[pg]

It is unlikely they have 235,000 stores. I would guess at most 30-50,000.

[ratsbane]

Now I'm curious about this. They list 71,245 under "shop by store."(1) However, I think this number may be low.

Are inactive stores listed in that directory? I'm sure Yahoo is billing for more than a few stores which never got beyond intentions.(2) We set up a test store a few hours ago "filmat16.com."(3) It's not been published yet so there's nothing there. It's also not listed in the directory by name (although this may be a function of time.)

If the $5b sales figure is correct (and I wish I could remember the original source of those numbers) and we use the 71,245 store count that's $70,180 per store/year. Reasonable?

Also my original estimate didn't take into account the (currently) $50 setup fee or fees for credit card processing (outsourced, but surely they make a bit from that), DNS fees, advertising revenue, etc.

In any case I think Yahoo has made rather a lot of money from their purchase of Viaweb - which is good for people creating startups which might be bought by Yahoo etc.

1) http://shopping.yahoo.com/stores/sd.html Is it reasonable to assume every store listed in that directory is a Yahoo store?

2) If that number is in any way related to the percentage of people who don't send back rebate forms it could be huge.

3) Not a completely for testing purposes; we're going to sell some 16mm films that have been sitting around in a closet for years. http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

[pg]

> Is it reasonable to assume every store listed in that directory is a Yahoo store?

No. Any web store can be in Y! Shopping.

[ratsbane]

You're right. I see that now. I would like to understand better how many Yahoo stores there are, how many are inactive, how many use the different services Y provides (shipping, inventory, etc.) Is it fair to say that Yahoo hasn't added many features to the stores since Viaweb? There are a lot of functions which Yahoo store operators have to perform which Yahoo has never added provisions for.

[rms]

Really, what figures? I always figured Yahoo was making more than that... Yahoo Store is expensive and popular.

[falsestprophet]

I think the name alone is worth a hundred million.