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

Creating Facebook Ads and Comparing with AdWords

I have been getting some hits from Facebook, so I thought I would experiment with their ad.

As I have been selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I have been using Google AdWords.  (You can see my other posts about my experience with Google AdWords).  Facebook ad is pretty similar to Google AdWords approach where we can specify the keywords.  Facebook calls this "Interest" which is pretty much similar concept as keywords.  Comparing with AdWords, Facebook does not have as many tweaks that you can do with Interest (Keywords); however, they allow narrowing down audiences from social perspective which Google does not.  These include: gender, age, location (which Google also has), relationship status, education and work places.

The ad mechanism works pretty much same as AdWords where we pay for the click.  We specify daily maximum spending and how much to pay per click.  The amount per click seemed to be little more expensive side than Google.  Google has a concept of Quality Score to determine the relativity of the ad; more relative the ad/site to the keywords, cheaper the cost to us.  Facebook does not have such concept, and suggested cost was higher than what was suggested by Google for relative ads.  Based on my criteria, Facebook suggested that I pay $0.53 to $1.24 per click; where as AdWords suggested cost of a relative ad was ranging around $0.20-$0.30 per click.

Creating my first ad did not take more than 10 minutes.
I just clicked on "Create Ad" button above their advertisement area on the right, and immediately I am able to enter information about the ad. Maybe because I have been experimenting with AdWords already, the flow seemed pretty straightforward for me.

Facebook allows to link the ad to the Facebook page by default, or we can specify an external site.  By default, it chooses the Facebook page.  I have chosen to have them go to my specific site because ultimately I want the users to go to my site through Facebook page, so why an extra click? I can think of an advantage of linking to the Facebook page to get more of "Likes" on the page, but for my first experiment I chose the simple form.

One suggestion to anyone who is creating the ad for the first time:  before choosing around different options, you might want to save your ad and other text information such as "interest" to a notepad or somewhere else.  When selecting some of the options, those text disappeared from me which frustrated me to re-enter them again.

The second page takes to the billing page where we (of cause!) put our credit card number.    There is a little link to enter a promotion code on this second page.   You can look around for a deal for these promotion code, for my case; since this is the first advertisement that I did, I found a promotion code where I pay $6.95 for $50 credit from non-Facebook site.   They only accept PayPal, and  I was skeptic at first, but  it worked for me.  They send you a code immediately in email after payment which I type in the Facebook billing page.

This is the second day after creating my first ad, and so far I have had one click with impression of over 1000.  I will keep monitoring and see how it does.


 

Should you be using Google AdWords for items on Ebay?

Should you be using Google AdWords for items on Ebay?

Short Answer: Depends on what you are selling. 

Long Answer:

I have been selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate in USA and have been using EBay as primary location for the sale.  I have also being using Google AdWords to attract some more people to purchase the chocolate. But does it worth it?

I have been selling various items on EBay, and what I have noticed is that there is no need to put any advertisement if you are selling well-know items.   For example, I recently posted a DVD for Microsoft Office with a reasonable price.  Within a day, I had a first bid.  I had more than 10 bid at the end of 7 day auction without any other advertisement such as Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.  

According to 2011 Q3 Result, EBay has 98.3 million users worldwide.  Although I was not able to find information on how many users are in USA, that is a significant number of users.  EBay pays for their advertisement so that our items are reachable to as many users/non-registered users as possible.  We are paying EBay for their large audience and their marketing they pay for our items to sell.  Great. Seems that it is a Win-win situation. 

So why do I want to pay someone else such as Google in addition to paying EBay?  The answer depends on what you are selling.  

Ninety eight million users worldwide is a significant numbers, but when it comes to targeting a specific audience; Google and Facebook has far more outer reach.  In my situation, I am selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I am targeting audience who has either been to Japan or has eaten the chocolate and know that it is a really tasty chocolate worth paying $29 for 12 package.  People who have not tried the chocolate will not understand why to pay such amount for chocolate.   Well, think about Godiva Chocolate.  Godiva is very well-known for their quality chocolate, and my goodness their chocolate is good.   People pay $30 - $100 or even more for their chocolate, and if you have eaten their chocolate you know what I mean.   Now imagine you are trying to sell Godiva chocolate to the audience who has never heard of Godiva.  Do you think they will pay $100 for chocolate?  Chances are pretty small, I guess. 

I have been experimenting mixture of advertisement, and what I realized is following: for selling items that require very specific audience, eBay will not be a good place to sell such items.   Google AdWords is a very powerful tools to target specific audience by selecting keywords etc (You can read my other posts for my experience with Google AdWords).   If you are selling an item on eBay that require such specific audience, I suggest that you could combine Google AdWords to promote your items.  

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.