Chances are that you won't see the real time link in your Store Manager, but if you have a legacy Yahoo Store or a new Merchant Enhanced or Premium account you can enable this feature for free. If you have a Merchant Intro account you cannot get this feature.
To enable the real-time link you need to call Yahoo customer service. I wish there was a link in the Store Manager that would tell people about the real-time link and how to enable it. There is information in the Yahoo help files (search for "real-time") about this feature, but why would anyone look for something they didn't know existed in the first place!?
This is too bad because the real-time link is quite a powerful feature. In essence, the real-time link is a mechanism for exporting order data in real time to an external server. The order data basically contains the same information you see when looking at orders in the Store Manager or when you get an order email.
Why is this useful?
The script or program on the external server receiving the order data can do additional processing or data manipulation. For instance you could have a script that posts order data straight into a MySQL database, email order data to different warehouses based on product codes, or send order data to an online accounting program. Naturally, you (or your developer) has to create such a program in the first place, but the potential for long-term time and cost savings can be significant. If a program can do it faster and more accurately than you can by hand, then let the program handle it.
Making the real-time link an obvious feature should also make business sense for Yahoo. By encouraging merchants and developers to create add-on tools and applications that make use of the real-time order export functionality, the value of the Yahoo Store platform as a whole can only go up.
View the second screen shot after clicking on the real-time link
