Our First Shipment of Imported Shiroi Koibito

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

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.

Experimenting with Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center is one of the Google’s service to sell items online. When you search product on Google, on the left side you can choose “Everything”, “Images”, “Maps”… and there is a link for “Shopping”.  The listing that you post on Google Merchant Center becomes searchable on this link.  I thought that this is little more complicated than other Google services such as AdWords or Analytic, and it is suitable for people who sell many items online.  Since all I am selling right now is JapaneseShiroi Koibito Chocolate, this was a good experiment to try out.

Basically, I had to create a text file to feed into Google Merchant which can be created by excel.  The text file contain the information needed for the Google Merchant to display the information.

The instruction is available  here, but what I found out was that the information posted on this help page is not as helpful as other Google services.  For instance, there are so many videos on Google AdWords to help out on how to use their service, but I had hard time finding information to get the data.

I usually want to just get a sample text, and then modify to my need.  However, I was not able to find a sample file of such.  So if you are looking for a sample file, below is an excel file that I created to feed the data.   You just need to save the file as Tab Delimited.  I have included the tab delimited file format as well.   

• Sample Google Merchant Center Excel File
• Sample Google Merchant Center Tab Delimited File

Here is the official link for the feed Specification.

The hardest part is creating this feed. Once you have the file, you just need to login and click on “Data Feeds”.  Click on “New Data Feed” button and manually upload the file.  For a small file like mine takes about 10 minutes for them to process them.  Once the file is uploaded, the product must be approved by Google Team where you can see the status by clicking on “Product” link on the left. 

Second Phone Call with Google AdWords

In effort to selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I have been able to get free phone calls for the first 6 weeks free phone call with Google Ad Words.  Please see my other blog on my first and third phone call experience.  After a week from the first phone call with Google AdWords, as they suggested I have called them the second time. I think that the call was not as useful as the first one, but I did get some ideas out of it.  There was no wait time for the call other than the fact that I have to provide the ID in email before conversation. Like last time, two days later, she has sent me a summary of the call with suggested link which I think is great that they do that.

Here are some questions I asked, and the answer.

1. Does the capitalization matter when I enter the keywords? 

No. 

2. Does the spacing matter when I enter the keywords? 

Google usually take account when users make mistake on spelling such as forgetting to enter space.  It will not help significantly by adding misspelled words. 

3. I have pending approved ads, can you approve it? 

This is one thing that I think they helped this time and last time that they expedited the under reviewed ads. By reading what other people are saying, this under review could take weeks.  By mentioning on the phone call, they were able to approve it in a day.

4. I have Google Merchant setup, but it is still under review.  Can you do something about it? 

This did not help.  She mentioned that it is another department, and she will check.  In the follow-up email, she mentioned that it usually takes few weeks for this to be approved.  As of now (2 weeks), the Google Merchant is still under review for Product Search, although Product Ads are approved. 

5. How does Quality Score relates to the bidding price? 

Bidding price is lower if the Quality Score is higher.  So the suggestion was to make the ads and keywords as well as landing page content as close as possible to boost the Quality Score which drives the Bidding Price. She suggested this link to read/watch. 

6. Any other suggestions? 
As always, she suggested for raising the bid price.  Yes, I know….

In the first few days, I was getting impression of more than 1000 a day, but it is slowly reducing.  I see the reason is that CTR (Click Through Rate) is low. In other words, when the ad is shown, users are not clicking on them.  So I think I will play around more to focus on #4 especially now. 

Spreading the Words; 20th Century Way

Back in 1998 I had an opportunity to work for a company in Japan which was selling items online.  As an entry job for me back then, my job was to go through all the blogs that was kept in Excel sheet and post an ad on each one of them.  Along with the blog, there were list and list of search engine that was kept in the same Excel sheet. Every time the company created a new page, my job was to go to each one of the list and submitted the site to all the search engines.  There was no Google back then, and no Facebook or Twitter. Time has changed since then.

As you can see on my previous blog, I have been focusing on the 21st century way of getting the words around such as Google and various popular social media sites to promote selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, but it made me ponder: would the 20th century way still be beneficial?  People do still blog, and there are still many minor search engines out there aren’t there? If I can reach even one potential customer, it might be  a worth spending Saturday night posting some ads on those sites. 

So I looked around, and found some sites that we can post advertisement for free.  What I found quickly was that many of the sites do not allow commercial use.  As Google says, don’t do evil. I don’t want to violate rules and posting my link to those who don’t want me to.  I learned it kind of hard way; I signed up for Flicker account and posted some of the pictures of the products with linked to the site.  They sent me an email the next day basically asking to remove the link.  I removed the link right away, and sent an apology email.  After that, I am more careful. I don’t want to make anyone mad. 

So below are the Saturday night list of places that I posted my ads.

Social Bookmarking and classifieds:

• www.Delicious.com 
• www.diigo.com (I could join a group of interest and post a topic. It allows me to bookmark and share with public, but little hard to do. You have to drag their icon to tools and then go to the page to bookmark. Once you do it, it is easy, but it was hard for me to understand at the beginning)
• www.ClaigsList.com (You can only post one ad in one city.  There are some people saying that you can use different emails etc, but I just created one ad)
• www.manta.com (Business Listing)

There are a lot more list of social bookmarking sites here, but I burned out at this point.  I'll see if I am getting a lot of traffic from these pages, then I might continue down the list later. 

Search Engines:

At this point, I have already submitted my site to the obvious: Google and Bing.

This blog gave me an idea if it really is good to do this or not, and my ultimate decision was, why not?

There are many of the search engines that I used back in 1999 that are no longer doing business.  Many are simply using google or yahoo as their feeder and no longer have “submit URL” page.  Below are the list of search engines that allowed me to submit a site.  I suppose many of the ones below will quickly be obsolete in next few years, but this is THE list of the survivors as of January 2013.  All the list below are free submission sites.

• www.amfibi.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.anoox.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.activesearchresults.com  (If you click on confirmation email, they will list on higher position)
• www.boitho.com
• www.dmoz.org (According to this site feeds to Google, so it is probably a good idea to do this)
• www.exactseek.com (Require email confirmation)
• www.gigablast.com
• www.infotiger.com
• www.Jayde.com  (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.linkcentre.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.mixcat.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.onemilliondirectory.com
• www.scrubtheweb.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.secretsearchenginelabs.com
• www.somuch.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.where2go.com (Require registration with email confirmation)

  

In addition, I have listed my listing in below Japanese Classified sites for Japanese audience:

• www.mixb.com - (There have one site for each for NY, San Francisco and LA)
• www.soysource.net - (Seattle’s Classified)

Free Phone Call with Google AdWords Support

About a week after I setup an account with Google AdWords, Google have sent me an email saying that I can call their support to improve the AdWords campaign for free.  The support is provided for the first 6 weeks without any cost.  That's great. I called the support center the next day, and spent about 15 minutes with the support representative.  No wait time. I just needed to enter the account number which was on the email.  The support asked me what my product is, and after that they suggested three things.

1. Separate Campaign by Language
Since Shiroi Koibito chocolate cookie is Japanese, my page is set up so that I have a page for English and another page in Japanese.  I had two ads; one in English and one in Japanese all in one campaign.

2. Remove any one word key word
I had massively entered all the key words that I can think of, and using the keywords tool with $0.01 set for most of the key words.  I had "Chocolate" or "Cookie" which they suggested to remove since they will never come up on the top unless I pay a fortune for each of the click.

3. Increase the bet
Of cause.  I did increased the bet for some.

I am still not getting many clicks, but "impr." (which stands for "impression" which means that the ad was actually shown to the user) has increased from 189 to 2468 in two days. Not bad.

They asked me to take these action and see how it goes, and I am supposed to call back in 4-5 days for more improvement.  Nice.   They sent me a summary of the improvements with some links to video tutorials on youtube and sent it to me in email the next day. Nice 2!

Well, little by little I am starting to feel like I am getting exposure, and you know what?  We just had the second order of two boxes today. Yeah!

AdWords screen showing 2468 Impression

See my other blog for the second  phone call and third phone call.

Creating Social Network Icon on the Web

After reading this article, I realized that I am missing Linked-In Icon on my website. Why not? So I did.

Here are the link to creating button on each of the social networking site for your reference.  It is pretty straight forward if you know basic HTML.   You just need to preview them online which generates code to paste.  Be careful that Google + code generates code to put inside <HTML> tag which might be overlooked.

• Facebook
• Google +
• Twitter
• Linked In

Social Network icon on my site