Posted by leepeng on August 29, 2009
Setting up an online shop is not straight forward as some might think. It is far beyond getting someone to develop a e-commerce website or installed a off-the-selve ecommerce solution.
Just share some experience we gained after developing some e-commerce solutions for our clients.
Are You The Pro?
I do not mean are you tech-pro; but are you your product-pro?
Personally I don’t believe you can sell something online if you do not have in-dept professional knowledge in the product you selling. One of our very successful client is a jigging master who selling popping and jigging equipments online. He kicked start with and online shop and eventually evolve to a real retail store. In addition, he also runs a fishing hobby forum and organising fishing trips to various hot-spots.
Where to Start?
Many people jump into conclusion that having eShop means building a e-commerce website. I always advise my friends to start small at places like forum and ebay, or promoting products at blog. Only invest in online store when they have sufficient product range and loyal customers. Do not start without a base. Do not think about the big market before you can establish a small market.
Payment
We normally advise people to start with a mixture of offline payment and PayPal at the beginning. Only consider premium payment gateway like Citibank when they have substantial online transactions.
Shipping
Shipping is an area that neglected by many during the planning of their e-commerce site. However, it play a major part as it affect the total price that the buyer going to pay. The value of the product must be justifiable enough for the shipping fee paid.
Take for example a 500g package will take about $65 to ship from Singapore to US using UPS. The fee will become ridiculously high if the item only cost $20!
Merchant can think creatively for the cheap and fast delivery of the products. Take fore example small items like neglacts can actually be shipped as registered mail instead of parser.
Marketing
It is actually a myth that an e-commerce website will be “self-market” after it goes live.
Just like normal shop front, nobody will know you if you do not market your shop.
Google will not rank you #1 in a very common search keyword after your website goes live.
There will be a lot of effort in doing visitation monitoring, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, online marketing using various social channels or event offline marketing.
Posted by leepeng on July 3, 2009
When new clients approach us for website revamp and indicate that they want to keep the existing hosting, the first thing we normally like to check with them is the server the website is running. We develops websites in PHP5 and ASP.NET 2 so this information is quite useful for us.
However the most answer is “I don’t know”.
So we need to find a way check this information.
Firefox has a cool add-ons call HTTP Header which helps us in this area.
There is a small bug in the current version which showed Japanese.
You will notice that this add-on can help you to know the web server type (apache / IIS) and the application server (PHP 5, ASP.NET 2).
These information are actually embeded in the HTTP header and our browser does not show them. This ad-on do no magic but to show whatever existing information to us.
Anyway, if you are not Firefox user, start using Firefox now. You will be happy always 
Posted by leepeng on
Have you ever encounter the situation which after getting your hosting for a while, you start to notice the email send from your server couldn’t reach your recipient; especially when the email is sent direct from the webserver using sendmail (e.g. mail function of PHP)
I myself is not hosting expert. However, after a few shocks, I somehow figure out some simple mis-configuration that easily happen to hosting engineers while setting up new server.
Two main cause: 1st is the missing of qualified domain name and second is missing of SPF setting.
These two can be observe easily by looking at the email header content in GMail. Try create a simple testmail.php which will send email to your GMail account using PHP’s mail function.
<?php
mail("leepeng@gmail.com", "Test Mail", "Test 123", "From: something@xx.com");
?>
Then open the source / original message of the email.
Here is an example of “Healthy” email
Delivered-To: leepeng79.chen@gmail.com
Received: by 10.142.43.3 with SMTP id q3cs50083wfq;
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:03:53 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.114.255.12 with SMTP id c12mr12997276wai.11.1246352633584;
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:03:53 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <bounce@organisedmum.com.sg>
Received: from organisedmum.com.sg (organisedmum.com.sg [116.12.50.227])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 1si12092283pxi.65.2009.06.30.02.03.52;
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:03:52 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of bounce@organisedmum.com.sg designates 116.12.50.227 as permitted sender) client-ip=116.12.50.227;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of bounce@organisedmum.com.sg designates 116.12.50.227 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=bounce@organisedmum.com.sg
Received: (qmail 20407 invoked by uid 48); 30 Jun 2009 17:03:51 +0800
Date: 30 Jun 2009 17:03:51 +0800
Message-ID: <20090630090351.20397.qmail@organisedmum.com.sg>
To: leepeng79.chen@gmail.com
Here is an example of “unhealthy” email
Delivered-To: leepeng79.chen@gmail.com
Received: by 10.142.43.3 with SMTP id q3cs126200wfq;
Thu, 2 Jul 2009 00:18:36 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.224.28.130 with SMTP id m2mr10174634qac.52.1246519115111;
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:18:35 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <nobody@vm4.kfc>
Received: from vm4.kfc (202-150-217-11.rev.ne.com.sg [202.150.217.11])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 15si3872346yxe.130.2009.07.02.00.18.34;
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:18:34 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 202.150.217.11 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of nobody@vm4.kfc) client-ip=202.150.217.11;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 202.150.217.11 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of nobody@vm4.kfc) smtp.mail=nobody@vm4.kfc
Received: from nobody by vm4.kfc with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <nobody@vm4.kfc>)
id 1MMGZG-0005GT-VS
for leepeng79.chen@gmail.com; Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:18:51 +0800
To: leepeng79.chen@gmail.com
If you observe, you will notice that the “healthy” example has a qualified domain name which associate with the IP address. However the “unhealthy” exmple does not have a qualified domain name. The mis-configure one will either has setting localhost or just the server name in the private network (vm4.kfc for this example)
Second is the “healthy” example can pass GMail’s SPF check but the “unhealthy” one have the mark of neutral. SPF is to help make sure the server is not used for spamming. When GMail said it is neutral, it means GMail don’t know if the server is right or wrong.
My experience is that GMail has been very generous in their antispam as it will accept most of the emails. However, if you notice these 2 mis-configuration, it will be likely the mail would not able to deliver to Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or some corporate email addresses.
So now you have something to argue with the hosting engineer 
The last thing to check is to make sure your server’s IP address is not blacklisted. One common place to check is at www.spamhaus.org
Posted by John on July 2, 2009
Posted by leepeng on June 14, 2009
Visited one of my mother’s friend; who was one of the last blacksmith in Muar, Malaysia.
This is his small warehouse…
The various “customised” tools made by him.
Blacksmith is consider a “sunset” job in Malaysia as many tools are manufactured now adays.
It is a tedious work which require hardship and experiences.
However customisation is sometime still needed to achieved special task or to best suit the user.
In Forecepts, we have not ventured into the area of manufacturing.
We are the Web Smiths, doing customisation, hearing from our customers so to built a solution that best meet their business and personal usability preferences.
Posted by John on June 9, 2009
We are happy to inform that Forecepts have upgraded to a bigger space. Don’t worry, we are still located in the same building, we just moved to another unit #03-01C. Do take note of the change in our unit number for future mail correspondence. We will be happy if you can visit us sometime and see us at our new office.
Posted by John on
Picked this one from an old email, is this how our web programmers relate with our sales & account managers? Hahaha, interesting food for thought …
A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She reduced altitude and spotted a man below. She descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago but I don’t know where I am.” WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
