Minimum Bids:

A minimum bid is the minimum required bid for all of your products that belong to a given subcategory to appear in Yahoo! Shopping. Some merchants may have a minimum bid that is lower than the default minimum (Default minimums are the published bids that have replaced the rate card). For example, Yahoo! Store merchants, who had a 20% discount off the rate card before the launch of the bidded marketplace, will continue to get the same discount since their minimum bids will reflect a 20% discount off the default minimum.

However, advertisers who have a minimum bid below the default receive no advantage in ranking. Their minimum only allows them to have a product appear in Yahoo! Shopping at a lower amount. If they actually bid below the default minimum, their lower bid will cause them to rank lower than merchants bidding the default minimum, all other ranking factors being equal.

The minimum bids you see in the Bidding UI or in your Bid feed are your minimum bids for each of your categories. If you do not want to pay more, you can keep your bid at this level. If you want to help improve your traffic in a given category, you may consider increasing your bid. If you bid below your minimum bid in a given category, products in that category will not appear on Yahoo! Shopping.

To make bid management simple in the Bidding UI, a red color coded indicator will appear when you have set a bid that is below your minimum in a given category and a green color coded indicator will appear when you have set a bid that is at or above your minimum in a given category.

Click here to learn more about Yahoo! Store merchant benefits (Link to the “Does Product Submit offer special benefits to Yahoo! Store or Merchant Solutions customers?” FAQ)

Please Note: While your bid is only one factor in determining your product placement, a higher bid increases your chance of appearing near the top of the search results in Yahoo! Shopping

Bid Landscape report & Top 5 bids:

The Bid Landscape report shows the competitive bid landscape for a selected category. If the selected category has subcategories, the report shows the cumulative bid landscape that includes the subcategories. The Bid Landscape report contains the following information:

• Graph showing the distribution of merchant bids within a selected category
• Top 5 bids in the selected category (not available for cumulative bid landscape reports)
• Your bid position with the selected category (not available for cumulative bid landscape reports)

Please Note: Competitive bid information provided in the Bidding UI & the Bid Landscape cover bids over the default minimum (Default minimums are the published bids that have replaced the rate card) and do not include merchants included via free web crawl or other business relationships.