Metafluence

Yahoo!s malicious business practice

I was helping a friend of mine set up a Yahoo! Store to sell jewelry online. She had already purchased her domain name from BlueHost, so I was trying to figure out what the DNS info was for Yahoo! to update her domain name. I am a very capable web developer, but after a solid fifteen minutes of digging through their “help” section I couldn’t find what should have been easily accessible information. In fact, all of the links about redelegating your domain name actually lead to prompts to transfer your domain to Yahoo! rather than simply providing the primary and secondary DNS. Finally I found a phone number buried in the contact section, which I called. After answering a few questions, I finally gathered the DNS info I was looking for, so I let the person know that I had struggled to find the DNS info on their site. That person let me know that they didn’t have that information on the site, which is what really upset me.

Here I was following their help section links in good faith that clearly stated I would find the DNS information to point my domain to their servers, but instead all of the links lead to pages that told me how to transfer my domain to Yahoo!. I happen to be a knowledgeable web developer, but someone with less knowledge (the exact market that Yahoo! Stores appeal to) would likely be confused and end up transferring their domain to Yahoo!. This is a form of bait-and-switch sales that preys on the ignorance of customers in order to profit from the renewal fees associated with domain names.

So, my hope is that this blog post does 3 things:

1. Alert fellow internet users of this malicious business practice that Yahoo! has in place.
2. Alert Yahoo! that smart people are paying attention to them and letting the public know about it.
3. I hope this post ranks well in search engines so people can easily find the DNS information to point their domain(s) to a Yahoo! Store without being forced to leave their current registrar.

If you already own your domain name and would like to use a Yahoo! Store their DNS info is:

• Primary: YNS1.YAHOO.COM
• Secondary: YNS2.YAHOO.COM