Store Editor or Site Builder?

Yahoo! Store

As you probably know you can build your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions site in a couple of ways:

Which way is better? I think the Store Editor is still the better choice for most merchants who have to manage upwards of 30 products. Using an HTML editor is probably o.k. if you have very few products, but you still won’t get a nice shopping cart page or the product search engine.

There seems little doubt however about which tool Yahoo!  wants you to use: Site Builder. Site Builder is a tool from the Web Hosting division, which seems to dwarf the Yahoo Store team in terms of accounts and revenue.

What I find troubling though is when Yahoo! misrepresents its own tools and services as evidenced in the April 2005 Small Biz newsletter. The client site referred to in the article was clearly built with the Store Editor and NOT Site Builder.

Why not let customers choose the tool that works best for them, particularly since the Store Editor has such a strong following? Oh well, maybe it was just an unfortunate mistake…