Gotta love the late entry by Yahoo/PayPal (I'm going to call it Payhoo). From what I've read its almost a copycat of Google's "Checkout" payment processing service.

- Why are they using a blue cart like Google? To confuse customers. If you are offering PayPal, stick to a small PayPal logo or icon which can use existing awareness of users. Now Yahoo users will become confused as to thinking there are now Google Checkout merchants with special icons on Yahoo. Yahoo may win some of the market share and dilute Google's power.
- Takes too long for icons to show. In the fine print it reads "10 days" before any cart icon will show when you sign up for the program. Google has this beautifully solved- cart icons will show usually by end of day.
- Merchant's can't offer Google Checkout and Payhoo for the same website. It's against Payhoo's TC's.

I think that those icons need to have more than just prominence on the sponsored results. A shopping cart icon itself has no meaning to the Yahoo community at large since I'd imagine 99% of Yahoo's community has no idea about the PayPal/Yahoo partnership. If I saw that shopping cart icon for the first time, I'd wonder - What does it do? Who does it benefit? It doesn't even tell me that this means that the site supports Paypal when I mouseover the image.

Until Yahoo's members know the meaning of the shopping carts, having the logo does nothing.

... having the logo does nothing.

Actually, from one week of testing, I show that it actually decreases CTR by 12%! I agree with my fellow posters on this thread - and, apparently, it's so unclear that users actually avoid it...

poster_boy-

can you PM me with some of your ads. I'm interested to know how you got your icons to show so fast already.

are you able to control the icon from showing in your ads? I'd like to know how you are measuring the 12% drop already since it takes 10 days to get your the logo on your ads.

I'd like to know how you are measuring the 12% drop already since it takes 10 days to get your the logo on your ads.

Hello biking4jesus - We already had PayPal Express Checkout implemented on our site - so, Yahoo took it upon themselves to opt-us into this program as a "trial" last Wednesday. And, no, we were not granted control over whether or not the icon showed.

I'm in the process of opting out now...

Interesting...

Thanks for sharing.

Anyone else try this out?

Seems weird that the CTR would drop...