Start Up Diary of Selling Japanese Chocolates (Shiroi Koibito) in USA

Un-Boxing Jaga Pokkuru - Phontom Snack of Hokkaido

2016-01-24T15:19:00.005-08:00

I have heard about Jaga Pokkuru in the past, but I was not able to get hold of the product before due to scarcity of the product. The manufacturer of Jaga Pokkuru (Calbee Potato Farm) limits the production due to limitation of quality potato used for the snack; therefore, this snack is known as "Maboroshi no snack" which translates to Phantom Snack in English.

Finally, we are carrying Jaga Pokkuru on our store and you can buy Jaga Pokkuru here.

Here are pictures of un-boxing of Jaga Pokkuru. The box contains one large and one small Jaga Pokkuru.

The package is sent via Japan EMS

Packed well with light-weight packing material

Jaga Pokkuru - Large and Small

Jaga Pokkuru Large on the left, Small on the right

Jaga Pokkuru (Back) Large on the left, Small on the right

On the side, there is "open" tab so that you can easily open

Opening Jaga Pokkuru

Inside Jaga Pokkuru - each package has 18g of snack

Jaga Pokkuru

One pack of Jaga Pokkuru

Back of one Jaga Pokkuru

Yum!

Un-boxing -41 degree by Kitaguni Meika

2015-05-31T10:10:00.003-07:00

Here are pictures of un-boxing the -41 degree by Kitaguni Meika which is a new item we carry now. We love this so much, and the packaging is even better than the other items we carry; it is unique and very authentic.

-41 degree by Kitaguni Meika

The image of the packaging is dream-like image of snow and frozen tree. A sticker mentions about the local award they have received this year.

Side of the box has print about the -41 degree experience in year 1902.

The ingredient which you can find English translation on our product page.

Opening the first wrapping.

Beautiful packaging!

From the back

This is the very unique part about this packaging; the top layer is diagonally cut so that it looks very stylish. It is almost like opening iphone packaging.

We proudly present you "original confection" Enjoy for deserts or party snack.

Close up of the packaging

Look how beautiful it is

Yes, it is perfect for office or party. It looks really nice

Wording on the package.

And here is the individual package

The sparkle of the white images the frozen ground. Beautiful presentation.

Yes, it is sensation I cannot forget.

Shiroi Koibito now available in Thai

2015-05-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

From the web statistics from my site selling Shiroi Koibito and other Japanese Rare Sweets, I found that there are quite a lot of people visiting the site from Thailand. In fact, surprisingly close to 1/4 of the the traffic originated from Thailand. Knowing how people from Thailand generally have interest in Japanese and Japanese products, it was a natural course of action to open the site in Thai.

Special thanks to a help from Jaa Yoophoon who translated the site into Thai, the site is now available in Thai.

The site has been up and running in Thai now, and in fact; I already had some orders coming from Thailand! I am excited to be able to share the Japanese products to people in Thailand and hope to extend more globally.

Improving Checkout Process

2015-04-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

Since implementing OpenCart solution in 2014 to sell Shiroi Koibito and Gifts from Japan online, there are lot more sophisticated software available for OpenCart that enhances user experiences.

One weak point of OpenCart is their Checkout module where users cannot see all the information on the same page which makes harder for users to check out. We have now implemented the Quick Checkout where users can easily see what they are buying (with pictures) and even has survey to see where they heard about us. This also allows user to easily sign up for the account with just a check box click.

Before Implementing New Change

After Implementing New Change

Making Site Mobile Friendly - the Google Way

2015-04-19T12:41:00.001-07:00

To have presence in online ecosystem, there is no option but to follow rules set by Google.

Last month, I receive an email from Google mentioning that my site selling Shiroi Koibito is not mobile friendly, and the site rank will be effected. As many other web owners, I freaked.

Email from Google mentioning that there is an issue with the site

As in previous blogs, I have been working hard to put mobile friendly site, but I did it wrong according to Google. As I read the instruction from the email, I notice that the content of the mobile friendly page must mirror the content from the desktop page. What I did earlier was to create a new interface using OpenCart framework and have user click to go to the new site if they are using mobile. However, the structure of the new page was not the same as earlier and did not mirror the content of the original site. Oh boy.

So I decided to see what Google tell me to do. I decide to make the site responsive keeping the other new site still being operational. There are multiple ways of making the site mobile friendly, but since I am making changes to my original site, I thought I should follow "Google way" of implementing this. I find out later that this was my second mistake.

Google provides "Web Starter Kit" to allow site owners to make the site mobile friendly.

As I mentioned earlier, my profession is software development, and I have experiences with making a site mobile friendly; however, I have not used the implementation method that Google suggests which is called WebStarter Kit. In summary, this is extremely complex task due to technology used. I have windows machine that I develop the site, and the site is hosted on Linux server. In order to have windows work with the new approach, I had to install following software on my Windows machine. There are not too many documents of "how to install" them (as of March 2015) so I had to read a lot of external documents for my windows to work correctly. I spent a day understanding and installing following software on windows; Git, Cigwin, node.js, Ruby and SASS. After banging my head to the screen many times, I was able to successfully configure all the software at the end to have the website display on my local machine. Great! I was quite happy at this point.

Now I turned to the web server admin and asked if they can do the same.... well they faced the same issues as me on Linux environment where they have to install and configure all the tools that is being used by what Google suggests. They spend two days and realized that it does not work on shared environment. As I do not have dedicated server for my site, and my site is being shared by other users; they could not do the configuration unless I have dedicated server. So that was my dead-end. With the cost of having dedicated server, I could be spending on many other enhancements like translating to other languages and I was not willing to do that at this point.

I backed out, and used other method called bootstrap framework (most popular way in the industry as of March 2015) to implement the mobile friendly site. Google has a site to see if a site is mobile friendly or not. After all above, according to it, now my site is mobile friendly, and good thing is that traffic did go up after implementing the change.

Google finally accepts that the site is mobile friendly

The traffic did go up after all.

I am still not 100% satisfied with how the site looks as I coded everything by hand without using any frameworks like OpenCart, I will more likely making some changes to the site so that the site looks good. For now, at least the site is "Google certified".

Update: April 2015

As I made two set of the code for the same site with the above effort (one for mobile and the old desktop version). Since I still like the old look on the desktop, even the new site is mobile responsive, I have used split method following reference from Google with Java Script to mirror the contents between desktop and mobile. So based on the user's device, the site now automatically routes to either mobile or desktop site.

Zooming Product Images on OpenCart

2015-03-15T08:18:00.001-07:00

As I sell the Shiroi Koibito and Japanese Gifts, images are one of the main components that I would like to show with best quality possible.

There are many weak points about OpenCart as software overall, and one of them is how the images are shown to the end-user; it only comes with very basic image control.

Since openCart has introduced the 2.0 version, many \developers are catching up with cool add-ons that were available in the 1.x version. (You can read my earlier blog about OpenCart when it first launched v2.0.) Now there are a lot more options for purchasing add-ons to make the site better. I have used Magic Zoom Plus for this purpose. For $50 or less, the add-on allows a mouse-over with zoom like on Amazon which is very nice.

Hoping that a little touch like this give end-user better experience.

Before add-on

After add-on

Un-boxing Kibana Chocolate

2015-02-25T06:40:00.002-08:00

Here are un-boxing of Kibana Chocolate from Asahikawa Tsuboya. As mentioned on the product page, this unforgettable sensation of Japanese Chocolate won Monde Selection gold for 28 times!

Package arrive from USPS via Japan EMS

It is nicely packaged without any damage of cause

The packaging is very nice; it is packed like it is piece of jewelry...

and it is sealed nicely with a sticker.

It almost makes me feel guilty by breaking the seal.

Nice...

The paper inserts talk about Monde Selection and product. It is in Japanese, but you can read English summary here.

Mmmmm....

A bite of heaven!

You can see more about Kibana here.

or see more of Un-Boxing Other Japanese Chocolates:

Un-boxing Rokkatei Strawberry

Un-boxing Ishiya Yukidaruma-kun (from maker of Shiroi Koibito)

Un-boxing Rokkatei Strawberry

2015-01-31T07:36:00.002-08:00

Un-boxing is thrilling moment, and I always enjoy the experience especially when items I am un-boxing are Japanese items. Japanese packaging is quite unique, and I sometimes feel like they are obsessed for wrapping and packing.

Here are pictures of un-boxing Rokkatei Strawberry

Item is received in durable package shipped by Japan EMS (Here is a link for how items are shipped)

Inside is packed with air bubble so that items are protected and packing material is light for shipping

It comes with Rokkatei's original bag

Top part is plastic and can be taken out

and of cause, there is another packing!

Time to Enjoy...

New Item - Mifuyu Matcha

2015-01-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

Mifuyu has been one of our most popular gift items which is made by Ishiya the maker of Shiroi Koibito. I am personally fan of their Mifuyu line, and I was excited to try their new flavor; Matcha.

Matcha is fine powder green tea which is being used for the Japanese tea ceremony. It is made from shade-grown tea leaves. It is now iconic ingredients for many Japanese gifts, confectionery and souvenirs. Matcha flavored KitKat is known to be one of the most popular gift items purchased at Japanese airports by foreigners.

Mifuyu means "beautiful winter" in Japanese. Ishiya states that they named the product also because it sounds like "mille-feuille" in French. (Mille-feuille is French pastry also known as "Napoleon.") This product is Ishiya's version of Mille-feuille with their signature chocolate.

Ishiya perfected this Mifuyu Matcha by matching their signature milk chocolate with fine grade of Matcha.

There is only a box of 3 pack is available right now, so we are selling 2 boxes as one set thinking it makes more sense to add two to make sense of the high shipping cost from Japan.

You can order them now from this link.

How Items Are Being Shipped

2014-12-28T07:51:00.001-08:00

Many customers ask us how items are shipped, and what is the experience like to receive the items from us. This short article hopefully answers the questions as we post pictures of the items being received in USA. Picture is worth a thousand words. We actually ordered our winter-only limited item Yukidaruma-kun from our website ourselves and un-boxed it so that we can show how our customers experience receiving these tasty gifts.

All items sold by us are being shipped from Japan directly to USA and anywhere else in the world. This is done so that you get more days before the item's expiration date. We use Japan Post EMS to ship from Japan. Items being shipped by Japan Post EMS, and the items are usually routed to the local post office based on destination country. In USA, that is US Postal Service (USPS). Customers from US receive the package via USPS just like any other postal mails.

Items being shipped from Japan Post require signature verification by USPS in USA, so if you are not home while the items are being delivered, the USPS card is placed at your door so that you can pick up the package with picture ID from local post office or ask USPS to deliver again when you plan to be home.

And here is how the package looks like when it arrives at your door! (This size is for Yukidaruma-kun, but other larger package like our popular Shiroi Koibito 54 Count will be packaged in a larger box.)

Then the fun part of un-boxing the package; you notice that the package is packed extremely careful with packing material.

The packing material is using air cushion packaging so that it is light and also protects the merchandise well.

The actual box of the Yukidarumakun is sealed. This is true for any other items from us.

Then each piece is being wrapped in yet another plastic covering which is really nice. (If you receive any gifts from Japan you probably experienced this, Japanese are almost obsessed with packaging,.)

Now it's time to try the unforgettable taste of Japanese Chocolate. Enjoy!

Here is another post for un-boxing Rokkatei Strawberry.

Making the Site into Multiple Languages

2014-12-06T18:55:00.002-08:00

Thanks to wonderful translators, we now have the site in English, Japanese, French and Chinese. You can select the language and currency at the top of the site. It's a lot of work for a person to translate these (well I did English and Japanese :). I especially like how Chinese translation went. Based on the sound, the translator applied words that has both meaning and yet having the same Japanese sound.

You can find out on the new store front at:
https://www.guidea.com/Shop/

Opening New Store Front

2014-11-25T07:24:00.002-08:00

Earlier, I was mentioning that I was looking for a tool that I can use to maintain the products for my chocolate site. Mainly I wanted to find a solution so that users can use mobile or tablet to view the site. It is amazing that on my site statistic, 45% of the users are coming with phone or tablet based on Google analytic (See my previous post about obtaining Google analytic). My earlier site which is my own written html/php was not mobile-friendly.I tried few options such as ecwid (See my previous post about ecwid), and I found OpenCart.

OpenCart is open-source php base shopping site software. I really liked the features available, and the community using this tool is huge. Larger the community is, the better for us so that there are more helps available when needed, and also they will have more templates and tools available. Based on how I looked around, openCart has a lot bigger community then ecwid as of now. (Nov 2014)

From the cost perspective, openCart is free (open source) as long as I am able to maintain it myself (which is not as easy as ecwid -- see below). However, I ended up paying for extensions and SSL certificate (See my previous post about obtaining SSL certificate); therefore, the cost turned out to be about the same as ecwid for the first year. Keep in mind that the free software comes with a cost of hassle of setting up and maintaining the software where for ecwid, users don't have to worry about SSL and hosting etc.

It has been quite challenging to have OpenCart up and running. One of the biggest hurdle for me has been that the latest release of v2.0.0.0 which was released only one month earlier than when I am writing this post. This is a major release which introduced mobile-friendly responsive design which I really want, but there are so many bugs and unsolved items which turned out to be a hassle for me each turn to setup.

Here are few problems I encountered;

1. The software is dramatically different from earlier version of v1.5.x, and it has only being released for one month, not too many extensions are yet available in the market.

2. The code is buggy; and not too many posts that I can find on the web to solve them because it is so new that people have not encountered with those bugs yet. I end up being the first tester and the Ginny pig. I contacted about bugs through github, and the developer community has been quite responsive to my questions and reports for bugs.

3 No templates are available yet. One of the great things about being part of large community is that they would have tons of options for me for the templates that look great. Opencart itself looks really good already, but there are other templates available for earlier version but not the latest version yet.

There were other things I had to do in order to have openCart running. I created couple of posts along the way so you can read them if you want.

1. Creating Privacy Policy and Term of Use for My Site

2. Obtaining SSL (https) for my site

And here is my new site address: https://www.guidea.com/shop/
At this point it is only in English and Japanese, but I am working on other languages now.
I'm pretty happy with it; it looks great from mobile as well!

Obtaining SSL (https) for my site

2014-11-19T19:36:00.002-08:00

I mentioned in the other post that I was experimenting some third party software to sell my chocolate rather than using my own written code. As I am experimenting with these tools, I realized that I will be needing SSL certificate for my website.

I am not using SSL certificate on my site right now because I simply use PayPal button which navigates the customers from my non-secure information-only html/php site to secure PayPal page. Customers tend to like this configuration as a lot of people trust the name of PayPal. All the secure information such as credit card number are entered on PayPal site. So my hosting didn't need SSL.

Now with the new fancy tools, the customers have to enter their information on my site itself, and not PayPal any more. So, the site itself has to be secured in order to use these tools. They will still be using PayPal to pay for the transaction, but shipping address and other information are entered on my site and not on PayPal.

So I decided to get proper SSL certificate. Here are brief summary steps I have taken to do this. It is not intended for technical reference at all; I am writing this so that you can understand what kind of effort and steps are needed to do this. This whole steps took me about a week all together from beginning to the end.

1. After searching around for different options, I decided to go with SSLs.com. They seemed to be the most economical yet dependable and have good reviews. I entered my information and paid for the certificate.

2. Then I had to contact my hosting company to help me with the certification. (By the way, I thank them for their great support throughout the process.)

3. For the certificate, I require to have static IP address. I had to pay extra to my hosting company to obtain static IP address as my site was not using static IP address before.

4. The hosting company also had to generate a text code called CSR from the server where my site is hosted. CSR is to me just a bunch of random characters. Here is a screenshot of the portion of it. (btw, characters in the below image are different than actual one for security reason)

5. I had to go back to SSLs.com where I bought the certificate and enter the CSR code I got in the earlier step. I had to provide other information such as address etc.

6. I got confirmation email which I had to process to verify and approve the certificate as an administrator.

7. SSLs.com now sends me another bunch of jumbled code called CRT. I had to give that to my hosting company.

8. Once it is done, the site doesn't look right. It turn out that some contents are referenced with hardcoded http which the browser didn't display. So I had to fix that and some settings...

9. In case when user goes to http, user should be navigated to https site. This is the configuration of how to do it on Apache. https://www.sslshopper.com/apache-redirect-http-to-https.html

10. Yeah! my site is now https://www.guidea.com/Shiroikoibito/
If I think about it, it's a lot of steps and money to have one extra character on my website address, no? : )

It was a bit of hassle, but everything is working well now and the site is finally secured!

Creating Privacy Policy and Term of Use for My Site

2014-11-14T22:25:00.003-08:00

I am experimenting with other site templates which are similar to ecwid to sell my chocolate on my site, and then they have templates for Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. My site has been "my home page" looking from 90s or something so far which I kind of like, but I have no intention of doing anything wrong or not following rules. I think it is proper to have proper privacy policy and term and condition. I tried to look for painless and honest way to create Privacy Policy and Term of Use for my site.

These days, there is "app" for everything, you know.

I used http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com for creating privacy policy. The site asks for standard and straight forward questions which then at the end the site provides the proper language for the privacy policy. The steps were pretty clear, and easy to navigate. At the end, the site asked me couple of times to "upgrade" my "free" privacy policy to a fancier one which will attract more customers; I could easily say "no" and I got my privacy policy for free without much of pain.

And I used http://www.entrepreneur.com/formnet/form/1174 for terms and condition. This template only has very few points which are in red color to pay attention to parts that need to be customized. It was not as easy to find this template as privacy policy template, but this one seems to be a simple and straight forward one that I can easily use.

Trying out Ecwid for online shopping site

2014-11-13T07:00:00.002-08:00

I have been creating my own website to sell Shiroi Koibito chocolates as that is what I do for living; I have been reading about some online shop templates and I wanted to try it out. I can think of some advantage of using these sites are
1. obviously, we do not need to know the programming
2. the site is optimized for mobile ready which can be quite tricky for programming.
3. ease of maintenance especially if there are lots of inventory

And of cause, the con of it is that we have to pay monthly subscriptions and sometimes the customization of the site can be quite tricky.

Since ecwid is one of the popular ones I often hear about, and also provide free account for up to 10 products, I thought of trying it out.

The process of setting up and uploading pictures etc are quite straight forward. It took me a bit to get used to it, but after posting couple of items, the site guide to learn the shortcuts (like control + s to save) which made it a lot easier to post the products later on.

The site looks pretty good, but the customization require manual changes to CSS other than their only three templates (blue/brown/red) I wished they have more templates to choose from. (There are actually quite a lot of cool looking templates out there with fees.)

I think this is a good option for someone with no coding skills, but I decided to keep my original website to sell Shiroi Koibito for now since I have more than 10 products and I do not need to be paying for monthly subscription for more than what I am already paying for my hosting and payPal etc. But it was a good experiment.

Providing Holiday Specials - Gift Set

2014-11-11T20:24:00.000-08:00

Each year, I provide some special promotions around holiday seasons. Mostly, I introduce new items to sell for the season. During the year, I try out some of the new items and introduce the ones I liked during the holiday time. I am so excited about this year's new addition... Shiroi Koibito Gift Box!

You know, Japanese people love giving gifts. In multiple times of the year, people just exchange gifts, and they all look nice and wrapped very well. I am always amazed by how Japanese people package the gifts. Chocolates are packaged like piece of jewelry! This Shiroi Koibito gift sets are no exception. It was the first time for me to try their cookies and i-Gato which tastes just as amazing as their best seller, Shiroi Koibito. They are not on the cheap side, but I bought few for myself to give during holidays!! (and for myself too... yum)

Extending the Product Line - Rokkatei Itsuka Kita Michi

2014-08-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

Rokkatei, the popular maker of Marusei Butter Sand has released a new product (released in April 2013) called "Itsuka Kita Michi". The full name of the product is "Kono Michi Ha, Itsuka Kita Michi". The Japanese words translate as "This way is a way once passed in the past."

The product name is long, but the taste of it really make you feel like it depicts the name of the product. It does not taste like a "new product", but rather they make me feel like the taste is something I tasted long time ago when I was a kid.

The name actually originated from lyric from a Japanese song called "Kono Michi" which is a famous Japanese children's song. The relics of this song is written by a Japanese Tanka Poet Hakushu Kitahara (1885-1942) who is regarded as one of the most popular and important poets in modern Japanese literature.

This song is believed to be written about Hokkaido, Sapporo based on words used in the song such as "White Clock Tower" and flower of "Acacia" which is a type of flower. (The actual flower which exists in Hokkaido is actually Pseudoacacia and not Acacia.) This product uses honey from this Pseudoacacia which brings in unique flavor that goes very well with their original product of the butter sand.

Unlike the original butter sand which the outer part is made of cookie doe, they uses soft pie crust on this new product. They also added lemon, chocolate and jelly made out of Marmelo which is fruit tastes similar to apple or karin (pseudocydonia). As like any other Rokkatei products, they use no artificial food coloring which is amazing that they can make the bit of red color of Marmelo jelly with natural ingredients.

We have extended our product line to add this product. Hope you enjoy this unforgettable sensation created culinary master, Rokkatei. You can purchase the product online at our website.

Adding PayPal Shopping cart to the site

2014-06-01T10:39:00.003-07:00

I often saw orders from customers for multiple items. They buy one item like Shiroi Koibito 12 Ct. and Mifuyu. Since my webpage only had "Buy Now" button on the site from PayPal, customers often made two purchases to buy multiple items. I shipped them together, but there was obviously a need for a shopping cart system so that customers can buy more than one items on the page.

Adding shopping cart was a simpler steps using PayPal. It is part of PayPal merchant service. I think you have to have a business account to use PayPal merchant. Just like creating a "Buy Now" button, there is an option for making it a "Add to Cart".

I needed another icon on the top of the page to see "View Cart" so that at any page, customers can view cart and checkout. Here is a link to how to setup shopping cart using PayPal.

Both of them are simple JavaScript that I can copy and paste to HTML pages which was very straight forward.

Leaving E-Bay, Welcome PayPal

2013-05-04T22:32:00.002-07:00

It's good to look back sometimes, and see how different it is from more than an year ago to what it is now.

In the beginning, we were selling Shiroi Koibito on E-Bay. Our website was pointing the traffic to go to E-Bay link of our product and user could buy item on E-Bay.

We now moved away from E-Bay model, and now have "Buy Now" button from PayPal so that users can buy the cookies from us directly. In the beginning, it was great to have e-Bay market items for us, but now thanks to Google, Facebook and and other search engines and social medias, we have established enough popularity on the web that we no longer need e-Bay to market for us, we have enough traffic from Google and other websites.

This is good for us for couple of reasons:

1. Users do not need to register through eBay. I had few requests in the past that they want to buy them directly and not through eBay as they do not want to register through eBay. This kind of gave us an idea to move away from eBay style as soon as we had enough traffic to our site organically.
2. No eBay Fee. PayPal still charge for each transaction, but lower than eBay fee.
3. PayPal does not charge any monthly fee. They only take the fee when the item is sold. That is great that no need for any insertion fee or any other fees associated to market through eBay.
4. PayPal BuyNow buttons are pretty straight forward to create. Once the account is created, there is "Merchant Service" tab at the top, and click on an image of "Create payment buttons for your website." After creating the button, copy and paste the HTML to the site. The only thing is I could not figure out how to do "Shopping Cart" which I should be able to do, but that is my next step...

One thing we were worried about was our credibility. EBay has a great feature to be able to know about the seller's performance from past sales and feedbacks from past buyers. Since we care for each and every package, our feedback rating was 100% positive which must have given users comfort to buy from us. On our website, we do not have that. The number on G+ and Facebook like icons that we put earlier is increasing little by little and that must be helping to give credibility to the users. We took a chance, and we think we were able to transit well from eBay to PayPal world well.

I do not think if we did this right away, we may not have been successful; the route that we took to go through eBay first and all the marketing efforts must have paid off now. That is good.

Extending the Product Line - Mifuyu and Tsumugi (Shiroi Baum)

2013-02-17T16:34:00.001-08:00

Ishiya makes couple of other great products, and I always wanted to include them in the product line: Mifuyu and Tsumugi (Shiroi Baum). Both of them are my favorite, but it is not that well-known like Shiroi Koibito. I am a big fan of Shiroi Koibito and knowing that I also love these, I think that people will also love these products as well.

Following are the write-up I did about these two products for the website.

Mifuyu: Mifuyu means "beautiful winter" in Japanese. Ishiya states that they named the product also because it sounds like "mille-feuille" in French. (Mille-feuille is French pastry also known as "Napoleon.") This product is Ishiya's version of Mille-feuille with their signature chocolate. Mifuyu comes with three different flavors: 1. White Chocolate with Marron (chestnut), 2. Black Chocolate with Blueberry, 3. Milk Chocolate with Caramel.

Tsumugi (Shiroi Baum): Tsumugi means "silk thread" in Japanese. They also call this product "Shiroi Baum" which means white baumkuchen. (Baumkuchen is European dessert which the name is named after German literal translates to "tree cake" or "log cake".) Tsumugi was introduced by Ishiya in December 2009. They used their signature product Shiroi Koibito to create baumkuchen cake; the every bite brings the rich flavor of white chocolate from Shiroi Koibito which is the size that can be shared with friends and family. Ishiya claims that they tried 100 recipes with "slightly altered combination of ingredients" to create this product; which gives you taste that is unforgettably perfect.

Expending the Product Line - Rokkatei

2013-01-27T17:05:00.004-08:00

It's been an year now since I started to sell Shiroi Koibito through my website, and last year was a great year. We sold many Shiroi Koibito, and as far as I know, there are not even a single unhappy customer. We tried to treat each and every order special, and shipped each and every order with care.

I was fortunate to be able to visit my home country, Japan, at the end of the year. Since this was my first visit after the Fukushima incident, I was mentally prepared to see some affect in Tokyo area, but they were doing wonderful as far as I could see. Japan was not going backwards, but I saw full of energy everywhere in town. And food was yummy. :)

I wanted to find other product that I could sell and loved by people in US, and my father mentioned about Rokkatei. It is another snack of Hokkaido which is very popular in Japan. I tried to find this in Tokyo area, and it is very difficult to buy this in Tokyo. As with Shiroi Koibito, they limit these products to be sold outside the region so that people still buy these as good "Omiyage" or souvenirs from Hokkaido. I found a shop called Hokkaido Foodist in front of Tokyo station. (Recommend if you every visit Tokyo Station, you can try this shop, they also have a restaurant where you can try Hokkaido food right there!) I tried Rokkatei, and I liked it. I brought back to my friends in USA and they liked them as well.

Hence, I expended the products to sell Rokkatei now, and the site is up and just got my first order online. :)

It is available at: http://www.guidea.com/Rokkatei

Creating Facebook Ads and Comparing with AdWords

2012-03-04T04:24:00.000-08:00

I have been getting some hits from Facebook, so I thought I would experiment with their ad.

As I have been selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I have been using Google AdWords. (You can see my other posts about my experience with Google AdWords). Facebook ad is pretty similar to Google AdWords approach where we can specify the keywords. Facebook calls this "Interest" which is pretty much similar concept as keywords. Comparing with AdWords, Facebook does not have as many tweaks that you can do with Interest (Keywords); however, they allow narrowing down audiences from social perspective which Google does not. These include: gender, age, location (which Google also has), relationship status, education and work places.

The ad mechanism works pretty much same as AdWords where we pay for the click. We specify daily maximum spending and how much to pay per click. The amount per click seemed to be little more expensive side than Google. Google has a concept of Quality Score to determine the relativity of the ad; more relative the ad/site to the keywords, cheaper the cost to us. Facebook does not have such concept, and suggested cost was higher than what was suggested by Google for relative ads. Based on my criteria, Facebook suggested that I pay $0.53 to $1.24 per click; where as AdWords suggested cost of a relative ad was ranging around $0.20-$0.30 per click.

Creating my first ad did not take more than 10 minutes.
I just clicked on "Create Ad" button above their advertisement area on the right, and immediately I am able to enter information about the ad. Maybe because I have been experimenting with AdWords already, the flow seemed pretty straightforward for me.

Facebook allows to link the ad to the Facebook page by default, or we can specify an external site. By default, it chooses the Facebook page. I have chosen to have them go to my specific site because ultimately I want the users to go to my site through Facebook page, so why an extra click? I can think of an advantage of linking to the Facebook page to get more of "Likes" on the page, but for my first experiment I chose the simple form.

One suggestion to anyone who is creating the ad for the first time: before choosing around different options, you might want to save your ad and other text information such as "interest" to a notepad or somewhere else. When selecting some of the options, those text disappeared from me which frustrated me to re-enter them again.

The second page takes to the billing page where we (of cause!) put our credit card number. There is a little link to enter a promotion code on this second page. You can look around for a deal for these promotion code, for my case; since this is the first advertisement that I did, I found a promotion code where I pay $6.95 for $50 credit from non-Facebook site. They only accept PayPal, and I was skeptic at first, but it worked for me. They send you a code immediately in email after payment which I type in the Facebook billing page.

This is the second day after creating my first ad, and so far I have had one click with impression of over 1000. I will keep monitoring and see how it does.

Should you be using Google AdWords for items on Ebay?

2012-03-03T11:38:00.002-08:00

Should you be using Google AdWords for items on Ebay?

Short Answer: Depends on what you are selling.

Long Answer:

I have been selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate in USA and have been using EBay as primary location for the sale. I have also being using Google AdWords to attract some more people to purchase the chocolate. But does it worth it?

I have been selling various items on EBay, and what I have noticed is that there is no need to put any advertisement if you are selling well-know items. For example, I recently posted a DVD for Microsoft Office with a reasonable price. Within a day, I had a first bid. I had more than 10 bid at the end of 7 day auction without any other advertisement such as Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.

According to 2011 Q3 Result, EBay has 98.3 million users worldwide. Although I was not able to find information on how many users are in USA, that is a significant number of users. EBay pays for their advertisement so that our items are reachable to as many users/non-registered users as possible. We are paying EBay for their large audience and their marketing they pay for our items to sell. Great. Seems that it is a Win-win situation.

So why do I want to pay someone else such as Google in addition to paying EBay? The answer depends on what you are selling.

Ninety eight million users worldwide is a significant numbers, but when it comes to targeting a specific audience; Google and Facebook has far more outer reach. In my situation, I am selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I am targeting audience who has either been to Japan or has eaten the chocolate and know that it is a really tasty chocolate worth paying $29 for 12 package. People who have not tried the chocolate will not understand why to pay such amount for chocolate. Well, think about Godiva Chocolate. Godiva is very well-known for their quality chocolate, and my goodness their chocolate is good. People pay $30 - $100 or even more for their chocolate, and if you have eaten their chocolate you know what I mean. Now imagine you are trying to sell Godiva chocolate to the audience who has never heard of Godiva. Do you think they will pay $100 for chocolate? Chances are pretty small, I guess.

I have been experimenting mixture of advertisement, and what I realized is following: for selling items that require very specific audience, eBay will not be a good place to sell such items. Google AdWords is a very powerful tools to target specific audience by selecting keywords etc (You can read my other posts for my experience with Google AdWords). If you are selling an item on eBay that require such specific audience, I suggest that you could combine Google AdWords to promote your items.

Our First Shipment of Imported Shiroi Koibito

2012-02-20T05:07:00.000-08:00

So we did it. We have shipped our first shipment of the Imported Shiroi Koibito Japanese Cookies!

We are currently selling the items on the eBay, and eBay makes it very easy to mail a package. Any items being sold has a link saying "Ship this item". Simply click on that link, and the label is literary printed in few clicks. I need to know the weight and size of the box first. By entering the size it shows all the charges for different options of USPS shipping methods such as Express Mail, Priority Mail Flat Rate, Regular Priority Mail etc. They make it easy with only one click to pay the shipping cost which gets charged to the linked PayPal account right there. E-Bay allows you to print the label and even print a packing slip with a custom message in just few clicks.

One suggestion to anyone starting to sell items on eBay is to get all the different boxes available from the USPS prior to shipping the items. Office Max started to carry USPS boxes too which happened to be more convenient for me since there office hours are usually more extended than USPS offices if I am simply picking up boxes. You can also have USPS deliver the boxes online from USPS website, but that took about a week for it to arrive.

I noticed that based on the size of the material and destination, the charges can be optimized if you have boxes in hand. For instance, shipping to California was cheaper for me to use the Regional A Box (which is a kind of box available for free pick-up) rather than the regular Flat Rate Box. Both services get to the California destination on the same day, but it was $1 cheaper with Regional A Box. Without having the box in hand, I would not have noticed the differences or even know that the product can be fit in any of those boxes.

Now that we have shipped our first shipment, we have started to expend the items for selling. With the similar approach to what we have been doing, we have created Japanese Imported DS and Wii Games site. I will post more experience for this new area as I go along.

Third Phone Call with Google AdWords

2012-02-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

This is the fourth week since I started using Google AdWords to sell Shiroi Koibito, Japanese Chocolate. I have 6 weeks of free support from Google AdWords, and I have made a third phone call to Google to get their input on how I am doing so far.

Please view my first and second phone call with Google AdWords for previous phone call information.

This phone call was more useful than the last phone call. I was not sure how much more I can get help from them, but since the time is limited, I thought about calling again and see what the had to say.

As always, I did not have to wait at all after calling their toll-free number (1-866-2GOOGLE (246-6453)).

I have told the Google Representative that I have followed all the suggestions they have suggested so far, but I have a concern that now I get more clicks but not enough sales. In other words, my conversion rate is not good. Following are the two suggestions they have mentioned to me which I thought was a great tips:

1. Use Match Types to narrow down the audience

Match Types can be defined per key words, and define them so that the ad will show up with more specific type of match. Google define following four match types:

Broad Match - By default this is the selection. Google will match based on relative term to the keyword specified. For example, my keyword is "Milk Chocolate Cookies" which could match to "Chocolate Cookie", "Cookies", "Milk Cookies", "Hot Milk" or even mistyped keywords such as "Milk chocorate"
Phase Match - By selecting this, exact wording sequence must be in user's keywords in order for the ad to appear. For example, my keyword is "Milk Chocolate Cookies" which matches with "Yummy Milk chocolate Cookies" or "Buy Milk Chocolate Cookies", but it WILL NOT match with "Chocolate Cookies" or 'Milk Cookies" because these terms do not contain phase of my keywords exactly how I spelled it.
Exact Match - By selecting this, ad will only show up when user types exactly what my keywords are being typed. If my keyword is "Milk Chocolate Cookies", the ad only shows up if user types that keywords.
Negative Match - By selecting this, we can restrict the ad to show up when user types the negative keywords. if my keyword is "Milk chocolate Cookies", and set Negative Keywords as "Hot Chocolate", my ad will not show up "Hot Milk".

In order to set the Match Type to the keywords, do following:

Click on Keywords, and right underneath Keywords is a button of "Columns". Click Columns->Customize Columns. Select Attributes->Click on "Add" next to Match Type. Now Match Type shows up at the end of each keywords that I have already defined. I can set any of the four types of the match types for each keywords.

This helped me greatly because by default Google sets up all the keywords with broad match which is great to get more clicks, but the conversion rate for them to buy my chocolate was lower earlier. Now I can only attract users who are really specifically wanting my chocolates. This reduced the number of clicks, but that reduced the cost which in turn increased the conversion rate.

For more information about Match Type, you can also see this link.

2. See What people are really searching for

In order to really narrow down the audience using the #1 method above, I need to know what is really showing my ads when people typed something. This second suggestion from Google help me find that.

Now that I have been running Google AdWords for last month, I have enough data to really dig down what users are searching when my ads are being clicked. This information is being "hidden" (I use this term because I didn't see this!) under "See Search Terms".

It is under the keywords tab, under graph you see "See Search Term" button. You click "All" on this. Make sure to select the date range that are not limited to only a day or two. You want to see as far back as possible to get all the data.
Now you see all the "Search Term" relative to which campaign and ad groups users actually used to get the clicks that we paid for. You will also see "Match Type" that I explained above if it was Exact match or broad match. You start to see really wired keywords matching with broad match type. I had a click with "Sushi Chocolate". I really do not want someone to be even clicking on my link when they are looking for Sushi chocolate. Yack! You can check the ones you Don't want and select "Add as negative keyword" button at that top. Now I just added "Sushi Choclate" and all other keywords as "Negative Keywords" so that when someone searches for these terms, I won't be paying for their clicks.

You see that green highlight with "Added" wording. This means that this keyword was already added. So i am good with those words, but any other keywords that you think that it is relative, I can add those keywords by selecting those keywords, and "Add as Keywords".

I can keep narrowing down and digging down the data to get optimized list of keywords.

I thought this phone call was a worth phone call for me. I have two more weeks before my free support expire. Let's see how things go.

For more information about See Search Term report, you can see this link.