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.

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.