Basically this is what the feature does – when merchant upload new products on the webStore, the products list are updated on the facebook page (wall) too.

Questions is, does it  make sense?

We give it a long & hard thought, It does make sense, if and only if you only upload 1  or 2 products at one time.

What happens if you upload a 10 or more  new products (which is pretty common for most merchants)? so it will become something like this below:

Now, let’s put yourself in a consumer’s shoes, would you even bother LIKE SUCH FACEBOOK PAGE ?

The answer is obvious, it looks like a spammy product page where people will avoid like a plague, and worse, with only one way communication aka ZERO ENGAGEMENT. The chances of your post appearing on your prospects or consumers wall is pretty dim.

That’s NOT how you are going to make your customer love you more (so they will buy even more !)

Now, let’s take a look just a few perfect examples by our wonderful clients. They shows us what engagement is all about.  Try see how many comments & like they are getting for their facebook wall posting.

so, the key is Engagement, by selectively hand pick the topic,  content, promo,  or product which will spur interest, get feedback, excite them to participate, is what Facebook does best. and is what every online merchants should be doing.

Today, most people visit facebook to connect with friends, to checkout fren’s photo, to see what their friends or families up too. Very few of them are in the mood or buying stuff, period.  Hardsell on product list just WON”T WORK.

So it’s time to rethink how you market your page and how you plan to reconnect with your fans / clients with heart!

On last note, We think, deciding on what NOT to do, is far more important than what to do.  It’s way to easy to fall into a trap by trying to be everything everybody else  did (esp competitors).  We just have to say, no, we are so-not going to build this. Have a great weekend ahead.

More valuable posts you shouldn’t miss!

http://mashable.com/2011/04/06/facebook-engagement-data/

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/11953/How-to-Encourage-Engagement-on-Facebook.aspx

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Come talk to us at Booth 1001 (Checkout the complete floor plan here) if you

1) Thinking of starting up an online store (and you already know what you want to sell)
2) Thinking of expanding your retail business via e-commerce
3) Already own a blogshop and want to turn your “hobby” into an own-branded webStore!

There’s talk on e-commerce too, we will be talking!
(Speaker: Adrian Oh, co-founder of neowave)

See the full list here

http://ecfair.lelong.com.my/2011/whats-happening-at-the-lelong-my-e-commerce-fair/

And don’t miss out these Online Marketing Workshop brought to you by iTrain + Lelong!

http://www.lelongmail.lelong.com.my/ecfair2011/lelong20110808.html

======================

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Then check out the king of e-commerce
Inspired? You should be!

Rome wasn’t built in one day, and you can do it too!

How? Start selling online now with webShaper miniStore – as low as RM 1 per day only!

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Social e-commerce is unstoppable! With Facebook conquering 600 millions users around the world, it’s something nobody can ignore (with notable exception like China or North Korea)

Here’s a very neat F-commerce infographics by CreativeFeed

Now, Imagine your eStore visitors could easily sign up an account  with you and do a fast checkout by just using their Facebook login! It’s amazingly easy and instantly boost up your conversion rate!

Easily let your visitors login via their Facebook account

Facebook Login will automatically prompt for Permission

Go to webShaper > Marketing > Social to enable it now! (Follow the tool tip guide)

Upload your icon (16 x 16px) and logo (75 x 75px)

Update the  Site URL and Site Domain (see tool tips for what to put there)

Attention: Don’t miss out these 2 fields or else you will get ERROR! Eg:

Site URL:  http://www.yoursite.com/fb/
Site Domain: yoursite.com

Tada… and you are done! It is really that simple!

A personal thanks from Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg:
“Thank you all for spending (wasting) so much time at Facebook and
made me Time Person of the Year for 2010. “

You can even filter and find out who’s actually login via Facebook! Now how cool is that!?

Image Gallery 

One of the most anticipated (and requested) feature by webShaper clients! It’s finally here! Not merely a simple Image Gallery, this one comes with automated resizing and carousel (thumbnail rotating automatically) and Zooming (support 2 types of zooming, outer zoom and inner zoom!!!)

Image Gallery in Action (see live demo)

Just click on any products, Edit > View Gallery to access the Settings

1-Click Shipping Setup 

Say bye-bye to cumbersome shipping rate setup. We have designed a new 1-click Shipping Setup option, for you to easily setup a shipping rate table and put into use in seconds!

Defaults are PosLaju Domestic, Poslaju International, International Registered Air Mail (Pos malaysia) and Fedex International Economy. Even you are not using any of this, you can take advantage of this to do a super quick setup on shipping rate calculation!!! (note: double check the rate as it changes from time to time).

1-Click Shipping Setup – Fast Shipping Setup + Saves you (lot of) time!

Shipping Rate table is ready with just 1-click! Then you can easily update the rates too!

Dynamic JQuery Menu

For customers with thousands of products, you probably have noticed a slow down in how the old product catalog manager’s menu is loading as it becomes “overweight”.  So we have improved the menu by using the latest Jquery technology, so it only loads the product items as it’s clicked on. This enhancement has made the menu much more “light weight”, it is saving precious server resources, speed up the loading time and result in better User Experience for webShaper Stores.

It loads the sub category or products in real time.

Payment Gateways Update

iPay88 merchants will love this, as we will be the first webStore service to roll out the “ipay88 delay callback notification functionality”, so any delayed in bank notification to ipay88, won’t result in payment status not being updated. Additionally, we have added a new payment gateway too call Smoov Pay.
That’s about all for now. Still yet to kickstart your webStore? What are you waiting for?

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Who doesn’t want that?

Is it even achievable if you are small business? Don’t sweat, the answer is…

(Special thanks to jim for the shooting…)

One of webShaper stores’s client, www.avalonsarees.com, now having a whopping 116,565 fans on the page! see for yourself!

http://www.facebook.com/Avalonsarees

So we are curious, we sms our beloved client, how she did it? so we send her a SMS to dig out her secret to 100,000 strong facebook fans…

So is it that simple? of course NOT! not to mention to do all the above is nothing short of challenges!

However,  we think there is more to that, these are some other critical factors too we think adding to their success too.

1) They command a niche (designer & celebrity sarees)
2) They sell globally and giving out Free shipping Worldwide!
3) Beautiful & sexy models.
4)  They give superb customer service.
5) They are passionate, else you can’t explain why their fans are so engaged!
(one posting update easily a few hundred likes, it’s hard to get this if you are not celebrity)
6) They use webShaper Stores (ok.. i admit i am bias but this is a fact, LOL )

Have any other tips to share on getting Quality Fans for your facebook page?

Share yours on the comment post! we love to hear from you.

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This iphone app is NOT yet released as of this writing.

Maxis-PayPal is claimed as the  world 1st mobile carrier plus online payment provider mash-up, it is set to to fuel the e-commerce eco-system in Malaysia! (hooray!)

The timing has never been better, there’s already a substantial PayPal user base locally to grow with (approximately 1.2 million Malaysia PayPal accounts and growing). And did we mentioned most webShaper clients are on a PayPal Business Account too?

If you have registered PayPal before, here’s how you can easily link it to your  Mobile Number (Prerequisite: You must be a Maxis client)

Logon to Maxis PayPal Page,

Step 1 Key in your mobile number, then request for TAC (Transaction Authorization Code)

Step 2 Key in your TAC (will be SMS to you)

Step 3 Enter your PayPal user ID (your email) and its password, create a new mobile PIN for yourself! (please don’t use your birthday!)

Step 4, It’s done! Simple ya !? (then of course, you will get notification SMS from Maxis-PayPal and also an email from PayPal notifying you that PayPal mobile is setup successfully)

But hold on a second, is that all? Well, sorta.

In every way, A maxis-PayPal account, is really like a co-branded car, imagine Naza importing KIA car slapping Naza-KIA tag on it, it is, still a damn KIA car.  Same goes for Maxis-PayPal.  It’s not obvious how it is distinctive  from a typical PayPal account with a few exceptions that

1) It grants you some exclusive offer only Maxis-PayPal account users
2) It  allows you to pay Maxis bill (postpaid) or prepaid top-up via PayPal (good news for those having spare cash in Paypal, we won’t mind if you want to send the $ to us too), You can login to your online account to see the screenshot below when you are trying to make payment.

PayPal option emerges once you linked up your Maxis mobile account to your PayPal Account

3) It  allows you to access your PayPal account via http://m.paypal.com by just using your mobile and mobile PIN ( as an alternative login for your email and password). Below we take a look at how it works.

fire up your mobile browser, type m.paypal.com
notice you can login using your mobile number + mobile pin?

once login, you can see your account balance.
and you can send money (to us, please) too!

PayPal mobile allows you to send money to
a mobile number too, something not available
in the standard PayPal webapp UI.

Check, and click on send! If the recipients is without a PayPal Account
tied to the mobile number, PayPal will SMS him / her sign up one!

Every transaction will be recorded, just login to  PayPal to see your mobile transaction.

So it’s that really ALL? We don’t think so, it’s just freshly baked, and Maxis Staff preparing the FAQs apparently didn’t have enough sleep (see proof below).

We should expect the capability to utilize SMS to check for PayPal balance, send payment etc soon as it’s covered here on a complete PayPal Mobile Experience (This is for US, so the SMS short code will not be applicable outside US) .

And of course, how can it be complete with an iPhone & iPad app? We look forward to these soon!?

Have anything to add? Please share your thoughts or comment below!

Please don’t tell us this FAQs is outsourced ya…

A Recap, you can see some of the featured merchants in video below:

News around the web

Maxis-PayPal Account FAQs

Maxis and PayPal pushing boundaries in Payment via Online + Mobile

Maxis, PayPal in strategic tie up

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At the same time, they also launch RHB WorldMart, basically a directory to help you spend money fast! From what we observed, there’s only a handful of Malaysia Online Shopping Sites listed inside (no worry, we will submit webShaper merchants to PayPal!)

Must give thumbs-up to RHB for taking a lead in such efforts, as you can see the comments from Malaysians in our wildly popular PayPal Malaysia post, a lot of them were asking “how can we top up PayPal Account to buy!”. If you wonder whether other banks will support this soon, our sources said – NOPE. as RHB is on a 2 years exclusive on this!

Do you know how many PayPal users currently in Malaysia? Unofficial figures quoted that there are about half a million malaysia PayPal users and about 100,000 are active!

For Singaporeans, you can easily top up paypal via POSB / DBS Bank.

More news around the web
==================

RHB aims for 10pc overseas revenue

RHB and PayPal lead the virtual wallet revolution in Malaysia and Asia

RM20 rebate if you among the 1st 10,000 to top up paypal via RHB bank

Rhb + PayPal – bring online transaction closer to Malaysia (signing pic included)

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Google says: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”, see the full paragraph here.

It even encourages you to report paid links if you ever discover your competitors done so.

And then now…. Google allows such ad to be advertised on it’s advertising network.

Understand why we feel like the “Orang Utan”? (Btw, you can visit this amazing animals by flying to Sabah, Malaysia)

How can 1,000 links being offered to you for only USD 9.99 if it’s not done in a spamming manner? If so, where is the iRAQ (inbound link = Relevancy, Authority, Quality) factor we keep sharing with our ecommerce merchants?

Curious to know more, the right way to do SEO? Don’t miss out our SEO guide for E-commerce Store

I guess when you are big and monopolistic, you can do what you want, don’t you?

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Recently there’s a report on TheStar,  as well as other websites like NST, Bernama citing there are 400 online businesses charged for not registering with SSM (aka the Companies Commission of Malaysia)

However, as you can see, the report is pretty short and vague, it did not really say who’s charged, and what are the exact reasons they are charged. So we can understand that it has stirred up quite some concerns and we decide to seek advice with our lawyer friend and also special thanks to our business partner Optima for giving us the heads-up on MCMC reply on this topic!!!

This is what our partner, Optima, email to MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, also known in Malay Acronym as  SKMM)

Dear Sir/Ms,

We refer to the recent report on TheStar where businesses who conduct online business did not registering with SSM (http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=%2F2010%2F7%2F20%2Fnation%2F20100720140310&sec=nation).

We are web developer and have helped many of our customers develop e-commerce related website for our customers. All our customers are companies registered with SSM. Now that they sell their products & services online, can you please advice do we need to re-register with SSM and if so, how do we do it?

As this is important, we appreciate your assistance on quick revert on this matter.
Thanks.

–
Best regards,
Daniel Ng
http://www.optima.com.my

This is MCMC’s official reply:

Dear Sir,

Several media reports published recently on online business registration with SKMM, Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (SKMM) would like to give clarification on this matter which has caused confusion to the members of the public.

It was reported in the media that SKMM is monitoring online business to detect individuals and companies which conducted business illegally.

The report was actually about Companies Commission of Malaysia (SSM) chasing after business entities operating on-line businesses which operate without proper business licenses. The Business Registration Act is not under MCMC’s purview.

The Act is being enforced by SSM and any legal action against the 400 local online e-business operators in the last two years for not registering as business entities can only be taken by SSM. It is SSM that has actually taken action against these websites and not SKMM.

Thus, business registration is required whether you are conducting your business offline or online and registration should be under Companies Commission of Malaysia (SSM). You may get further details from SSM at www.ssm.com.my

SKMM was cited but we actually provide SSM with technical assistance to “detect individuals and companies which conducted business illegally” if required by SSM for their investigation.

We hope the above clarifies on the matter.

Thank you.

Corporate Communications Department

Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (SKMM)

Then again, MCMC basically just say, no, we are not the one taking action (because this is NOT their responsibility), but SSM is.  Conclusion? It really doesn’t say much. Damn!

Anyway, luckily we know a capable, reputable and tech-savvy lawyer – Chris Tan, the founding partner of Chur Associates,  thanks a bunch for taking time out of busy schedule to reply our questions and doing this as a community service! (As of published date,  we are not billed for it,yet!    we hope the bill will get lost and never reach our inbox)

Let’s see if this helps in giving you a  clearer perspective from a legal point of views. (Q by us aka the layman, A by Chris Tan the not-your-typical lawyer!)

Q) Hi Chris, In referred to this act, does it mean that anyone, as long as you sell something (products or services), will need to register with SSM?

A) First of all, SSM provides for registration of both the businesses (sole proprietorship and partnership) and the companies. In the context of your question, it is in relation to the registration of business. The simple answer is that, business registration is required for those businesses that are some what structured, premature and continuous in nature.

For example, there is the existence of a business premises. There are exceptions under the Act, therefore not every selling and buying activities required registration with SSM.

Q) What if you do not directly sell something, but instead make money via publishing (or aggregate) advertisement from Google Adsense (which most bloggers do). Do you still need to register with SSM?

A) There is no specific provision in the Act to regulate this type of transaction. We are of the opinion that, as long as the content is developed on a personal basis and not collectively for gain, it does not fall into the jurisdiction of SSM.

Q) If bloggers go to jail (for not registering themselves with SSM while making tons of ad money online), will they enjoy Free Wifi Services (so can continue to blog and earn ad money)?

A) In the event the bloggers do go to jail, it is because of the violation of the law and no illegality shall be continue in any way whatsoever. However, this is an issue of compliance of law. Suppose if you have complied with the registration, you can legally make commercial gain. One point to note is that, a prison is not a commercial property. Therefore, operating commercial activities in the jail is still illegal.

Q) How about government servants who are encouraged to take up part-time jobs and business (quite a number will consider make money online at places like mudah.my, lelong, ebay, lowyat forum or open a store with webShaper), are they required to register with SSM also? Any special discount for Government servants from SSM, in appreciate of their great service and sacrifice for the nation?

A) As long as the services provided are of personal basis and ad hoc in nature, there is no need for registration with SSM.

Q) Let’s put online aside, how about those people like char keo teow hawkers, stay-at-home mom selling cookies during raya, babysitter taking care of my kids, are they required to register with SSM too?

A) For hawkers, by the wording of the Act, if the hawker stall is required to be licensed under any written law, ie: the local council licensed, it requires registration with SSM.  On the other hand, for stay-at-home selling cookies and baby sitter, generally these activities are ad-hoc in nature; therefore does not need to be registered. However, if the baby-sitter service is a professional one, it must be registered with SSM.

Q) What are the benefits of registering with SSM?

A) Generally there are no clear benefits of registering with SSM besides legalising your business.

Q) Can registering SSM really protect the consumers from scam? If so, why are still so many victims for MLM Scams in Malaysia? (they were all registered with SSM and been active for a long time)

A) No. by registration with SSM does not protect the consumers from scam. SSM only has minimal role in monitoring businesses. Business registration with SSM is only a fraction of the corporate governance under the Companies Act 1965.

Q) Is it true when we said, “whatever illegal offline, is illegal online”? Eg gambling is illegal offline, thus you cannot conduct gambling business online.

A) If any activity by its nature is illegal, it is illegal regardless online or offline. The question we are facing here is registration of business and compliance issue. So, your business must be a legal one and need to be registered with SSM. It is illegal because you fail to register it.

Last but not least, one should not into the conclusion by merely reading the news. If you are serious about this issue, you should get an audience with SSM to clarify the situation and you should involve as many stakeholders as possible like the MCMC, MSC, MDEC and many more that are tasked to promote Malaysia as a centre of online excellence. Please understand our role of a lawyer as an interpreter of law while SSM are the enforcer. Furthermore, the compliance of law by registering your business with SSM is not hard and only at a nominal charge. Thereafter, you just need to renew your business yearly.

Does this help? We sure hope it does. We certainly like to hear your opinions on this, faster post up your thoughts on comments field below!

Our point of view (non-legal, of course) is pretty simple,what’s the first challenge when it comes to online business?

“TRUST – the Customer Confidence“

So if you register your business (especially for new start up), it can help to increase customer’s confidence in you, especially when it comes to conducting an e-commerce business, Trust is very very critical.  (See Top 10 Ways to build trust for your webStore)

Moreover, it doesn’t cost much to register a sole-proprietor and partnership, so, let’s just do it!

And we are pretty sure government will be very supportive in encouraging people to setup online business (as long as it’s genuine) so it can help stir up new innovation which will eventually contribute to the country’s economy.

Like us? Hate us? Nevermind, just don’t forget to join us at http://facebook.com/webShaper to stay updated on what’s new at e-commerce, payment, marketing tips and tricks and more!

Happy Selling Online! @ webShaper Team

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(In US, USPS is mulling a price hike too)

If you are Malaysia merchant selling products online, chances are you are affected by the price adjustment.

But come on… Postman starting salary is merely RM610 / month. (reportedly 19% below that of their government peers and is well below the poverty level).

GOSH, don’t you think the poor guys delivering your mails and parcels deserve a better pay? (Yes! we think they do! so did he) I last seen an ad by Domino Pizzas promising salary up to RM1500 / month for pizza delivery boy. And i think you can get free pizza meals every days, which can save you quite a substantial amount.

If all Posman know this, resign and start delivering pizzas (no offend to pizza lovers…), who is going to deliver my damn baby diapers ordered online?  You !?

So this is the official new price list shown on the official POS website. Smart, they guy who posted this did not put the before-adjusted price (so you are clueless and can’t really compare… ), either he is the master of psychology of pricing, or he just being plain lazy.

Luckily we got this snatched form sinchew daily, it’s in chinese, so we added some label to guide you through.

News Around the web

郵費今起漲100%‧公眾大喊不合理

Snail Mailers upset at hike

Pos Malaysia delivers timely upgrades to operations

Pos Malaysia To Save RM8 Million Annually Via Automation

Postal workers to get higher salaries on July 1

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