Leaving E-Bay, Welcome PayPal

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)

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

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