Un-boxing Kibana Chocolate

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

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

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

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

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

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!