Akiba Mart Blog » eCommerce

2010 New Year Sale!

Toku — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:19:00 +0000

Akiba Mart had just started the “2010 New Year Sale” having discount up to 20% in Uji Tea and Tea Sets. Also for orders over $90 for Tea and Tea Sets, free shipping (including EMS international shipping) will be available.

It will be a great chance to try our best Uji Tea available. I believe you will be delighted with its taste and aroma. For the Tea Sets, these are worth having one at your home. Best to extract Uji Tea at your home, but also best for gifts to your important person.

Akiba Mart Is Open Today!

Toku — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:15:28 +0000

Akiba Mart project started at the end of February, and for approximately 3 month since then, Akiba Mart had started its service!

To deliver cool and fancy products from Japan to our customers, we had worked very hard. We were not a specialist for online stores and online marketing, however our passion made things going forward. We know that there are a lot of things to learn from our customers, we are always welcome for your comments and requests.

Our main products now are tasty Japanese tea and beautiful shadow boxes, but we are planning to expand it more. What product? No, no that’s secret for now

I would like to thank my friend Susumu for running this project with me, Kazuki for nice and cute illustrations in How To Prepare Sencha and How To Prepare Matcha pages. Also many thanks to everybody who gave us advice. We could not realize Akiba Mart without all of you. Thanks again!

Count Down for Akiba Mart Launch

Toku — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:09:21 +0000

We are going to launch Akiba Mart, our online store for Japanese goods, in next few days. There were a lot of things we overcame, both operational and technical matters. However, all of these directly connected to increase service level of our store and everything is aiming to maximize consumer’s satisfaction.

OMG! Akiba Mart Is Broken

Toku — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:43:05 +0000

I tried to update Magento from 1.2.1 to 1.3.1 via Magento Connect, but installation process ended up with error! Damn! I’ve searched the internet and tried to find out some solution to resurrect Akiba Mart, but no good answer was there.

OK, then let’s try clean installing and see how it goes.

But clean installation did not work. Magento requires “Safe Mode Off” in PHP5 to run, but my contracting hosting service does not support that. Do I need to reinstall 1.2.1 again? I made some research in the service of the hosting service and found that they had newly started to support “Safe Mode Off”!

I configured PHP5 and tried to access to backend. It worked! But for the frontend, the top page shows white screen while other pages placed deeper are fine. It took a lot of time to figure out that the reason was that the upgrade of magento overwrited /app/code/core/Mage/Cms/etc/config.xml file that is used for installed skin.

To conclude, I will reiterate the reasons of the problems:

PHP5 Safe Mode
Overwritten config.xml

Now our site is back online

Recommended Magento Plugins

Toku — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:50:24 +0000

Magento is strong eCommerce platform and has plugin feature to enhance functions. There are many of them registered in Magento Connect. Below is the list of plugins that I use in Akiba Mart so far.

Plugin	How it helps
Auctionmaid Matrxrate	Enhances shipping fee table rate. To do international shipping, shipping fee calculation will be a headache. This plugin will relief your pain.
Category admin product tab : edit product link	Adds a product edit link in the category product tab. Magento should enable this by default!
Change Attribute Set	Normally you can’t change attribute set after a product is registered. This enables to change attribute set anytime.
Fontis WYSISYG	Adds WYSIWYG feature in product description and etc. Umm, not as useful than I thought, because I can edit HTML by myself.
Mass Product Relater	This is GREEAAT! Easy and simple to register related products, up-sells and cross-sells.
Enhanced Admin Products Grid	Enhances the product grid to add a bunch of convenient features. Make your Magento more user friendly.

Magento: Beginner’s Guide

Choosing Ecommerce Application

Toku — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:59:22 +0000

When we kicked off our Akiba Mart Project, one of the most important thing is to create the infrastructure to realize online shopping. I did not have any knowledge about eCommerce, so I had to study about that first.

There are several open source shopping cart application available free, but total cost (including initial cost, variable cost and manpower) spending to create shopping cart infrastructure have to be considered carefully. Even though we use free application, if it takes too much time and effort to implement it, we rather choose pay service.

The points that I picked up to compare application are like this.

Initial cost and variable cost.
Original domain name can be used.
Built in payment gateway interface.
Sales and order management function.
Easy to customize (both front end and back end).
Full of manuals and online resources.

There were several candidates to compare such as Zen Cart, Magento, Multilingual Cart, Ohayo Cart, EC-Cube and osCommerce. In those shopping cart applications, I choosed Magento. Reason why I choosed Magento is that this application had flexibility in configuring the shopping site. Also Magento is new in eCommmerce society, which matched for me wanted something challenging.

Magento: Beginner’s Guide

Once upon a time…

Toku — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:16:56 +0000

Although there are many cool items selling in Japan, maybe most of these will not have a chance for you to take a look. I think this is kind of sad situation. Being a Japanese, I want to introduce these Japanese ‘cool’ things to many people in the world. Also if we can make a chance for customers to get one, isn’t that nice?

This is what I was thinking. And so as Susumu — my friend.

Then what can we do?

How about making a store? Cool!

So this is how Akiba Mart project initiated.