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)

Extending the Product Line - Rokkatei Itsuka Kita Michi

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

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

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.