Imagine being able to help someone follow their passion and bring their dreams to life. It feels great in your imagination, doesn't it?

It does in reality, too. I can tell you this firsthand, because it's what Yahoo! Small Business gets to do every day for our customers.

As I write this, we're in the midst of one of the busiest and most exciting times of the year for many of these folks: the holiday shopping season. Whether you’re a Merchant Solutions customer selling online using our store platform, or you’re a Web Hosting customer with a bricks-and-mortar retail business using your online presence to expand your customer reach, this time of year is crucial.

We know this, and delivering products, resources, and experiences designed to help our customers grow their businesses and be successful during the holidays and throughout the year is what we do year-round. For me, one of the best parts of this is knowing who will use what we deliver. In many cases, I mean faces and names, and not just business names. Something that makes Yahoo! Small Business unique is the face-time we get with our customers—not only at industry conferences like Internet Retailer, but also at our very own Yahoo! Merchant Summit.

Talking to our customers is my favorite part of the Summit. Some have businesses that have been life-changing not only for them, but also for their customers. Here's just one example: After her son was diagnosed with autism, one of our customers turned her experience finding ways to help him communicate into what she calls the best job she's ever had. She created National Autism Resources, a site where parents and teachers can find easy-to-understand information along with affordable autism teaching materials and products that can help children on the autism spectrum. If you’d like to hear more of her story, you can watch this video.

We get a lot of direct feedback from our customers at the Summit and through other channels about what they need to thrive and how we can delight them, and we incorporate what we learn into the products we launch. I’m lucky enough to be part of all the action, and am excited to tell you about a few of the products and features that Yahoo! has launched for our small business customers in recent months:

• For our Merchant Solutions customers, we launched a customer registration system that uses social login, where customers can sign in using their credentials from Yahoo!, Google, and AOL (we plan to add Facebook and PayPal to this list in the first part of 2012). Our system also allows customers to save their credit and debit card information. This is designed to make checkout faster and easier for shoppers, which can help to increase sales. The ability for shoppers to save card information is also a feature that most hosted competitors don't offer.

• Also for Merchant Solutions, we launched a new ecommerce site search that lets us leverage our Yahoo! Search technology. The new site search provides a better, more engaging search experience, allowing shoppers to add items to their carts from the search results page, refine search results with filters, search only specific product categories, and more.

• For our Web Hosting customers, we added a number of great new template designs to Yahoo! Site Solution, which makes it easy to design a professional-looking web site with little or no web design experience. We've also launched widgets that help customers customize their pages by inserting badges, banners, and HTML for custom widgets.

The dreams we help our customers achieve is what inspires me every day. It’s truly rewarding to hear our customers’ stories and to be able to deliver products that set them up for success, so they can continue to make their dreams real.

Jennifer Farwell
Sr. Manager, Product Content
Yahoo! Small Business

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.