Placebo Affect

For the past two weeks I’ve been trying to move a domain from Yahoo domain registration to another registrar, but have found that Yahoo is holding my domain hostage.

The problem is that Yahoo prevents you from moving domains by sending your conformation letters to contact@myprivateregistraiton.com.

Please note, these emails are supposed to be forwarded to you; however, I’ve been trying daily for two weeks and they are not. After contacting Yahoo several times and finding that there is no intelligent at Yahoo so I tried to make my domain contact information public thinking this would allow me to the domain email contact and it did! However, Yahoo did not update the whois record even though changes were “pending”.

Yahoo will let you make the domain “public” but when you update the info, you still will have all the admin emails sent to contact@myprivateregistration.com. I must admin at first I believed Yahoo’s message that it will take approximately 24 hours for the whois record to propagate but after several attempts and 5 business days and still nothing I now know Yahoo is holding my domain hostage.

Has anyone successfully transferred a domain from Yahoo that had their private registration service? If so, please tell me how you made this happen.

Does anyone take the University of Phoenix seriously?

I’m not arguing that it is or is not a good academic institution. I just wonder if anyone take the place seriously. It seems like every website I visit there is a banner or text ad for their online degrees.

It seems like their marketing works against their brand, unless their brand is mass academic saturation… but then again if that’s it, does anyone take this place seriously?

I know they even offer Ph.D’s… but I wonder what it would be like if they had a medical school or law school?

Recently I’ve been porting a lot of ecommerce websites from Yahoo’s shopping cart, Yahoo Store, to Volusion.

The two core reasons are the transaction fees and the nonflexable shopping cart.

Yahoo Transaction Fees

• Yahoo Charges anywhere from .75% to 1.5% of sales as a transaction fee on top of charge card fees from the credit cart companies.
• Yahoo does not refund these fees when sales are canceled or items are returned.
• Yahoo charges these fees even if the card is declined.

Yahoo Shopping Cart

• Yahoo’s shopping cart is not very flexable to match the look and feel of the website. This turns many shoppers off as they feel they may have been redirected to another site.
• Sites that use Yahoo Store default templates often look horrible and are not search engine friendly
• Many credit card companies will hold Yahoo manual payment transactions as the interface only shows the dollar amount, no detail like you often get with an interface from verisign/paypal.