Opening New Store Front

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

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

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

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

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)