Internet giant Yahoo! (yahoo.com) has been pursuing the trend itself through its small business services division Yahoo! Small Business and has recently launched two new enhancements to its e-commerce platform Yahoo! Merchant Solutions in an effort to enable merchants to more quickly and easily launch online retail businesses and to help them become successful once they are open for business online.

Through its "Success in 30 Days" initiative, launched in August, Yahoo! has focused on building an e-commerce solution it can package in a way that's easily digestible and can get merchants to success as effortlessly as possible. Yahoo! says its Open for Business control panel guides merchants through the entire process of opening an online business, including each of the five main steps: design, adding products, setting up payment options, shipping and tax.

"At Yahoo! Small Business, we want our customers' small business dreams to come true," says Jimmy Duvall, director of e-commerce with Yahoo! Small Business. "That's why our products are designed to make the technical side of e-commerce simple and easy, so that the business owner can focus on their products and customers, rather than software code. We want customers to move as fast as possible from being just subscribers to our services to becoming actual merchants that are open for business and ready to conduct e-commerce. With the new wizards, merchants can get their online cash registers ringing faster and easier than ever."

This week, Yahoo! launched wizards for the design and add product steps. The design wizard interface enables merchants to build online stores by choosing from a library of professionally designed store templates, or to create more customized looks by selecting from a range of color palettes and basic layouts. The add products wizard enables merchants to display an array of merchandise, embedded with online purchasing capabilities, with a few mouse clicks.

Duvall says the updates to Yahoo!'s e-commerce platform support the company's reputation for providing easy to use platforms.

"You can design and build a store literally within minutes," says Duvall. "If you already have your images and you know what you're going to write for your products, literally, you can get a store up and running in an hour. It's really changed the dynamic tremendously."

Duvall says the Yahoo! brand has been the company's biggest asset in targeting small businesses. However, he believes reaching small businesses is really kind of a grassroots effort as the company has been using trade publications and participating in conferences to focus in on the segments of the population that Yahoo! believes are either under-served or could be served better.

"I think business owners want to be online and selling and they kind of know that they have to, but there's this huge gap between that and feeling that they can do it and actually knowing that they will be able to do it," says Duvall. "I think [the e-commerce solution] really changes that dynamic and it shows that not only can you do it, but we'll help you ensure success at the end because we're not going to give you a bunch of technical jargon and give you this huge list of features and functions. We're going to hide that complexity for you. When you need it, it will be there."

Duvall says merchants can expect the other three updates to its e-commerce solution - payment processing, shipping and tax - in 2007. After that, Yahoo! Small Business will move to phase two in its "Success in 30 Days initiative," in which it will begin to offer solutions to increase traffic and improve marketing tactics for its merchants' sites.

"For us, it's such an exciting space," says Duvall. "Small businesses today have so many small barriers in front of them just because of their time commitments and resource commitments from a financial standpoint, and so we really think that we're changing that dynamic and really giving them an opportunity to succeed where they probably couldn't have had a chance to before and so we think it's a great opportunity."