Tuesday, 13 September 2011

Gmarket Selling

Ok cool! I've moved some of my listing for my site on to Gmarket for selling in Singapore.

Traffic here is really good I would say. However, it can be quite confusing to use in comparison to eBay. I had a lot of difficulties navigating the site for GSM Seller Tools, the user guide wasn't really of much help. But I decided to just trial & error and see how it turns out. It was pretty good. Had a sale from testing one of the discount functions.

Now testing their pre order function for my next batch of items for sale.

The customers here though I would have to warn are those really looking for super good deals. Some of the discounts given I wonder how the seller even makes a profit from here. Or perhaps its low profit. High volume would make up for it I guess.

The next project for me I would like to try is how to create those flashing images that they have on Gmarket. Yeah I'm absolutely so new to all this and have really grown over the past few months. Such a steep learning curve I would say.

Pros I like about Gmarket :
  1. I can list my listing for a year 
  2. It's actually quite easy to navigate once you have good practice - took me a month to figure out - their customer service has slow replies
  3. I can put my site url on the listing - which I think is cool - helps to bring my site ranking up
  4. No limit to my listings unlike eBay which has restrictions
  5. I can sell to my local market and there is even a Q phone service which customers can contact me directly
Cons :
  1. Customer paying through Gmarket, I would have to give 12% to Gmarket and they would take about 2 weeks before depositing into my bank account the rest of the money. 
  2. The flashing images actually really do distract me alot - lol - no idea why I would still wanna learn this though
If you wanna know more you can leave me a message and I would be happy to share my info as much as I can with you. 

Cheerios!

S

Monday, 12 September 2011

Wedding Venue in Penang - Decided

Yippee! Our wedding venue for Penang has finally been decided! And our TOP Choice goes to Cititel Penang for our 2012 Wedding Dinner in Malaysia.
Hooray! LOL... well I guess it's more of my choice. hehe

Reasons for picking this hotel was simple :

  1. Price was reasonable : RM$688++
  2. Convenient Location as it's in the city - so everyone can be on time! 
  3. Great spread of food choices for the dinner banquet and does not look like it's cheap stuff but really quality food being served. This was one of our top priorities
  4. The Ballroom has a high ceiling and looks grand and majestic, carpets smell clean and the small function room for the tea ceremony is actually quite big
  5. They gave an extra room free for the parents - that was a kind gesture
  6. corkage waiver for all tables!
  7. I searched for Cititel Penang on Tripadvisor and found that the GM actually bothers to reply all feedback and comments for the hotel. It is commendable for such attention to details
  8. Which comes to my last point, their service was really impressive. I've been to Malaysia many times, and because of their laid back attitude I kinda got used to their ultra slow service everywhere I went to. But it was refreshing to find a different attitude towards guests here. 
I do hope that this is the best choice for our wedding and hope that it will be a memorable one with lasting memories forever.

Cheerios

Sarah :)

Thursday, 8 September 2011

Food in Penang

Hey Hey! Just got back to Singapore on Tuesday from Penang, Malaysia.

I'm such a food addict, been eating almost 4 meals a day. LOL

Here's some of my favourites and great food I had at Penang on this trip.


Penang Laksa! It's near the Kek Lok Si Temple, along the street beside the wet market. 
You can't miss this! It's super awesome. I had to have this! Number Must Try. 


Penang Fried Char Koay Teow from Gurney Drive Hawker Centre. 
It tastes abit salty but it's just a different flavor that they have there. :) 


Another different stall in Penang, near Komtar that sells Char Koay Teow.
The Prawns served here are BIGGER! 


They call this Hokkien Mee in Malaysia, it's actually our Prawn Noodle Soup. 
This one is good! YUM



Wednesday, 7 September 2011

Penang Hotels Wedding Dinner - the search begins

Was away for the weekend to attend a friend's wedding in Penang and at the same time search for hotels to hold our Wedding Dinner at next year Feb 2012.

Our short listed hotels were :

Evergreen Laurel Hotel
- My Comments & Opinion : the place has a old majestic feel at the hotel lobby, staff were helpful and price (RM688++ per table) is reasonable given that they are situated along Gurney Drive. However, to my dislike was the pillars in the Ballroom that blocked the stage which in my personal opinion were a little unsightly, they do compensate that with a large projector screen that displays the stage, I believe there should be about 10 of them, which goes to show how much blockage there is.

Perhaps this is the reason why the staff were so willing to give us alot of freebies to close our deal. Such as free 2 nights stay for couple in Bridal suite, Parents also get a nights stay free. Complimentary food tasting can be used even during CNY period next year. Complimentary refreshments for the tea ceremony. And complimentary usage of one of the executive rooms for the gate crashing session in the morning to receive the bride. Oh not to forget that they even have a discount for min 25 tables at minus RM20 per table. Seems really like a very good deal.

We were shown the supposed bridal suites and I thought it was pretty alright and comfortable to stay in. However the date that we wanted was booked by another person and there isn't any confirmation that we had the slot. Hence, we proceeded to check out other hotels instead.

Traders Hotel
- One of the recommendations by my fiance's good friend was to check out the Traders hotel, known to be by Shang gri la, so we expected that the level of service would be higher in comparison to Evergreen Laurel Hotel. But to our dismay, the staff who served us wasn't really given much authority to make decisions on behalf of his manager and seemed really much like a freshie. Despite that we still decided to give the person a try to do our business. We visited the ballroom and the bridal suites, ballroom was pretty decent given the reputation of the hotel. They can accommodate if I am correct 30 tables in the first partition of the ballroom, second partition if you wish to book 35 tables it would be blocked abit by 2 pillars. The ceiling for the ballroom is pretty high, and looks grand enough.

Bridal Suites was alright and livable. However, I thought it should be better since the price per table was much higher at RM888 Nett.

Staff was not able to give us a proper proposal as to what our request was. And up till today has not replied nor called nor sent an email to update us on whether we have our requested date and our other requests can be met.

A little disappointed with the service here as I really had high hopes and was ready to say yes and make the booking here. So we proceeded for our third choice on our list of hotels.

Cititel Penang
- Our last stop on our search for wedding banquet venues in Penang was Cititel Hotel Penang. We were supposed to meet the Banquet Manager who agreed to meet us on last minute basis. Upon arrival, as he was attending to another guest, he brought us to the lounge and offered us drinks from the bar menu whilst waiting for him. I was impressed! To get this kind of service in Penang, Malaysia is amazing!

Things to note, the quoted price for Cititel is the same as Evergreen Laurel at RM688++ per table. They were adamant about giving a discount but I thought it was alright as service is the most important thing to me.

The ballroom was grand and smelled and looked really clean & bright! Same goes for the function room which would be used for the Tea ceremony and is conveniently located just beside the Perdana Ballroom. If I'm correct it fits about 50 tables. But a good 35 tables would be comfortably placed. There are NO pillars! So that's the plus point for me. I would like every guest to be able to see us from even afar.

The Bridal Suite has a beautiful seaview and it's design is modern and very suited to my taste. Absolutely love it! Yes, I would say that this hotel, although I'm being told by htb that it's not situated in a popular district like the one at gurney drive, is wonderfully perfect for me.

The food menu for the guest is also a good spread and far beats Evergreen's by alot. Just looking at the menu itself brings Cititel a notch higher. Plus point, they will waive all corkage fee for any amount of bottles for alll tables.

Hopefully all our requests gets approved by the Banquet Manager and we can proceed with booking this hotel. I believe that the Lord brought us and showed us and lead us to this and it feels restful too. As in we don't have to haggle much about stuff like we did at the previous hotels.

Grateful and thankful for this blessed journey and hope to hear good news tomorrow for the confirmation.

:)

Thursday, 1 September 2011

Google Adwords Part 5

Alright my google adwords campaign has taken off and I find that it is really useful.

No.1 I'm completely new to this and it really does drive instant traffic to your site.
Site ranking on Alexa had increased and broke through its longest standing ranking for the past 6 months. I'm so happy with this.

No.2 Its really easy to use, just key in  your campaign promotion and link to the landing page that you want the CPC ad to direct to.
I have a few campaigns running at the moment.

No.3 I added the google analytics and it reallys helps to see where your traffic is coming from.
Of course for my business it's mostly Singapore based customers. However I can also inlcude Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Australia or other countries. I can see from the reports where my unique visitors come from. It's amazing.

I would recommend this to anyone who is starting out their blogshop or e-commerce website to use this. As almost 40% of my traffic comes from search engine results. Some of course are organic search engine results and this information is displayed on the google analytics reports. Remember to include the script for google analytics on your website's script code.

Hope this helps!

Resize images in Photoshop

Ok I had a dilemma as I have so many images to resize and All of them are in different sizes.

I came across this blog while doing a google search and found this. Here's the link

Resize Image in Photoshop


Hope it will help me in my work. :)