The offerings include a comprehensive e-commerce service called Merchant Solutions. The e-commerce offering features a shopping cart and checkout pages that automatically calculate tax and shipping charges. In addition, Merchant Solutions will have the capability of presenting online catalogs and merchandising tools for coupons and gift certificates.

In a statement, the companies said the new services can be "accessed through a control panel that is integrated as a module" in a special SBC-Yahoo portal. "Customers can save time by managing their entire online presence and accessing their customized business content, communications tools and features from one location."

The SBC-Yahoo service includes Web hosting plans with 350 Mbytes of storage, 35 G-bytes per month of data-transfer bandwidth and 35 business e-mail accounts. The Web hosting product also includes 24-hour, toll-free phone and online support.

Another piece of the small-business offering is SBC Yahoo Business Mail, which enables users to customize e-mail addresses. The service comes with five custom e-mail accounts, each with 25 Mbytes of storage. It also comes with junk-mail and spam protection.

Pricing for the multiple services varies widely, from $6.67 a month for some mail features to $299 a month for some of the more robust e-commerce services.

*This story courtesy of Techweb.com.