The new site was built completely from the ground up. We developed the custom theme with primary goal to have the fastest load time while keeping all of required functionality and ability to display unique page layout for each of Bluelounge’s 30+ products. I invited Rizqi Nizamil Putra into the team to help with the front-end development as time was of the essence as well. We completed the project on time and boy, the results were better than our expectations. Thanks for Shopify’s solid infrastructure, most of the web pages loaded in less than 2 seconds. A critical factor when you are building an e-commerce site.

Bluelounge new website with Shopify

You always want to make it better and faster…

Move forward to June 2016, Bluelounge came with a very specific but interested request. In order to improve the site’s SEO even further, they asked whether it was possible to get the PageSpeed score above 90 for both Desktop and Mobile from Google’s PageSpeed Insights and an A from GTMetrix website performance tool.

To be honest, I initially considered the request quite difficult considering one of Shopify’s major limitations was that we did not have full control of the server and apps. After a bit of research on Shopify’s forums, this was a very common issue as found here, here, and here. There are many suggestions there which you could take to improve the site’s performance bit by bit, mostly were already applied on Bluelounge website, but probably not enough to make it get >90 PageSpeed score.

I took on the job nevertheless, the challenge intrigued me.

Performance analysis

When trying to improve a website’s performance, whether for SEO, load speed, or conversion rates, the first thing to do is to breakdown what have been done correctly and what’s still missing. That was exactly what I did.

Theme related items done:

1. Avoid CSS @import; except for the web fonts which are loaded from MyFonts
2. Valid HTML structure; no console errors

Content based items done:

1. Optimize images
2. Specify image dimensions
3. Serve scaled images

Important items done by Shopify by default:

1. Leverage browser caching
2. Enable gzip compression
3. Enable Keep-Alive

Critical items to improve:

1. Minify CSS
2. Minify JavaScript
3. Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

Even with the fast load time, PageSpeed still considered the site’s performance below standard and only rated it 83/100 for Desktop and 66/100 for Mobile.

Bluelounge website PageSpeed score result before optimization

The first two items were relatively easy to do, with the right tools.

Minifying and combining CSS files

The website’s stylesheet had been built using SCSS with Bootstrap for the framework, so minifying the output file alone was not enough to make PageSpeed happy with the file sizes.  I had to improvise. Using Bootstrap for Sass, I rebuilt the CSS by hand-picking Bootstrap components that were actually used and eliminated the rest. I also carefully merged individual CSS files into a single master stylesheet for most of the pages.

After minified, the final bluelounge.v42.css  is about 123KB in size.

Minifying and combining JavaScript files

Same as CSS, minifying alone was not enough if they files were still fragmented. PageSpeed really factored in the number of calls it had to make to load a web page. This time it was a bit more tricky though, as with JavaScript a small error or wrong order could break critical shopping cart functionality. It took extensive trial and error tests to get the desired output.

Luckily PageSpeed is more forgiving when it comes to JS files and I did not have to merge everything into a single file as I had done for the CSS. I still managed to combine 7 JS files into one to reduce the number of requests.

You could use these tools to combine and minify CSS and JS files:

• JSCompress
• shrinker
• Refresh-SF

Tip: always do thorough tests after merging and/or minifying CSS or JS files. At the very minimal, make sure you could still add items to cart, view shopping cart, and proceed to checkout.

Eliminating render-blocking elements above the fold

What is render-blocking content? In my own words: files or elements that delays the HTML page to be loaded as quickly as possible. Most JavaScript and CSS files are usually inserted within the <head> . This means your browser will try to download all linked files while it tries to complete loading the rest of the page, thus creating a delay from the of first byte received until the page is rendered on your screen.

Above the fold means the initial area of your browser’s viewport before scrolling further.

The concept is simple: to get the browser to render above the fold content as quickly as possible by reducing as many unnecessary elements as possible. Unfortunately, it’s really easier to be said than done.

Eliminating render-blocking CSS

For quick and lazy approach, you could always move all your CSS calls to the bottom, before the closing </body>  tag. The problem with this is, and you probably have seen it on some sites, you would see the page shown with plain content first before it quickly shifted to the stylized version a second later. For Bluelounge, this was not an ideal solution. They did not want to sacrifice form over function, which was understandable.

The solution was to use inline CSS for essential above the fold styles within the <head>  and call the rest of the stylesheet from external CSS file at the bottom of the page. I needed to create a mini version of the CSS and only include classes used to render above the fold content.

Why not inlining the entire CSS file and save the trouble from having to rebuild an entire CSS block? Because you want to keep the HTML code light. Inline CSS is not cacheable. If I put the entire CSS inline, I would add 74KB on every web page and PageSpeed would not like it either.

At the end my inline CSS was around 21KB, mostly from Bootstrap’s grid classes.

Eliminating render-blocking JavaScript

The final part was to optimize the JavaScript calls. I had been saving the hardest part for last. Shopify’s shopping cart functionality depends on JavaScript, specifically using jQuery library. What this implies is that I could not just move all JS calls to the bottom like with CSS. With the template structure at the time, some shopping cart ability like adding an item into cart works by loading the script block within the body of the page. If the jQuery library was called after the function, it would simply not work.

I had to restructure the JavaScript calls, removing any function made inside the content and combining them into an external JS file to be loaded at the bottom of the page. Some functions still needed to be retained as inline though. They required to call dynamic variable from Shopify’s liquid language. For these, I just move them further down.

After setting the right order of the scripts to be called, my work was done.

The outcome

The numbers speak for themselves.

Bluelounge Homepage – PageSpeed score 94/100 for Mobile

Bluelounge Homepage – PageSpeed score 95/100 for Desktop

Of course PageSpeed score is different from page to page and you should not just measure the Homepage. In this case, most of the pages have the score of >85. Mission accomplished.

These steps may not be applicable to all Shopify powered sites, but hopefully you will be able to pick up a point or two. Also keep in mind that if your site uses many third party apps that add calls to external assets, it is almost impossible to control those.

Interested to optimize your Shopify website? Please do not hesitate to drop me a line.

The post Shopify PageSpeed Score: Pushing the limits on Bluelounge website appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

However at the same time, you are also competing with thousands of other sites offering similar products. Most consider the defining factor would be the price, but I tend to disagree. Yes, customers have the tendency to shop around first and likely to make a purchase from a seller who offers the best deal. This is not always the case though, and if you follow this model then it is much harder to make your business sustainable because there is always possibility a competitor to be able to offer even lower prices than yours.

Give your customers a great shopping experience, then they will be back to buy more from your online store

After setting up the most important element: a running e-commerce site, business owners are typically focused on the marketing to attract customers into the website and eventually make it generate some revenue. An understandable strategy, as the the whole idea of creating the website is to make profit from the transactions. But usually first-time customer acquisition cost is higher than the profit generated from the first purchase. To ultimately get them to come back and order more items from your online store which probably costs much less is by giving them a great shopping experience.

The key is to be able to create measurements of your e-commerce operations and continuously monitor the performance of these areas:

Order fulfillment time

Rule #1: do not sell items which are not in-stock, or if you have to then give your customers a very clear lead time and stick to it. Nothing is more upsetting than having to just sit, wait and not getting the items you already paid for. This is an easy situation to get your customers to never come back ever.

Next thing is to calculate the average time required to get your order shipped. Ideally this should be completed within 2 day working days.

Clear communication

Do not hesitate to contact your customers if there are problems with their orders, such as delayed shipment or if you need to validate the transaction or address. This goes the other way, make it clear for your customers how to reach out to you. Customers might change their mind after placing an order more often than you think. Give them an opportunity to amend or cancel their order. It will build trust and next time they will not hesitate to place a different order from you.

Communication is not always limited to contacting through your website. If you manage social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook page, Instagram etc, be sure to check those regularly.

Human interaction is the great opportunity to give the true personality of your business. You will gain valueable feedback which could make your business much better.

Customer support

Still related with communication, but more specific is customer support. Your customers might have questions or problems when they have received the products they ordered. You and your team need to be an expert with every product that you sell, even it is not your own brand. “No fuss” return policy is always good to have if you can offer it, but often a customer just wants to be guided in using or maintaining a product. For more advanced type of products, you can consider providing them to the manufacturer’s website or document to answer the questions.

Just as important is to measure your response time. Generally customers expect to get a reply within 1 business day for their inquiry. Consider implementing a support ticket system to streamline your customer support process.

The post Non-marketing e-commerce checklist appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Nowadays, businesses have become more aware that having great looking websites is just not enough. With every competitor also owning a website, it takes more beyond good development for this particular digital channel to be able to contribute to the business. It needs to be discoverable, incorporates interesting content to make potential customers or clients stay and browse, and ultimately have proper call-to-action elements to convert them.

The work after a website is launched is much harder and requires more dedication to achieve the targets. While all those elements above were already considered during design and development phases, it is almost impossible to create the right formula without field tests and make data driven decisions based on the site’s analytics results.

All these lead to 3 components in general: online marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and e-commerce strategy. The first problem to tackle is, most people (read: clients) may not be aware of the differences and consider them as the same. They might come to you and mention any of the terms and expect it covers everything.

Different agencies or professionals may have different interpretations to give explanation of each of those. Some just want to make the client’s life easier by not bothering about technical definitions and just provide a “full digital service”. These are really smart guys. However there are times when you really need to draw lines regarding each of these services to define scope of work and priorities between them.

Online marketing

I consider it as a marketing effort if you need to create an outline to be done in order to generate traffic to the website. Usually involving consistent actions over a course of time period.

In general, I classify online marketing into 4 categories:

1. Organic or non-paid online marketing
   This is done by promoting the website through different networks to gain some backlinks. Few examples:
   • Posting links to landing pages or blog posts on online discussions/forums
   • Notifying bloggers to review or feature a product or service offered on the website
   • Offline promotion (word of mouth) to lead customers to the website
2. Social media
   No company these days will be able to generate massive inbound traffic without the help of social media. By setting up a good social media profiles and consistently posting latest news and updates through these channels, it would increase the brand awareness faster than any other channel.
3. Email marketing
   Still one of the most effective channel. Never ever take this one out from your online marketing strategy, unless no ones literally uses email anymore.
4. Paid online marketing
   This can be done by creating ads on multiple networks, such as search engines and social media. My favorites, because of the ease of use, effectiveness, and popularity, are Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and AdRoll. Although keep in mind that every industry may have different niche and types of market, so you need to select carefully and always be ready to try different ones in order to get the best result.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Unlike online marketing which requires financial investment in order to run, SEO is the organic solution. It is also the most difficult and complex to get positive results. The challenge is, you need to compete with billions of other websites and make the search engines to see your website as the most relevant when someone is searching with a particular keyword or key phrase.

The copy of your content is still the most relevant factor. However other technical elements such as site speed, URL format, page structure, sitemaps, they all weigh into the overall score. If your site is bloated and slow to load, it will probably end in lower search ranks compared to other sites with similar content.

It is not possible to break down everything about SEO in a single post. But to keep it short, when you work on your site’s SEO, it means trying to make it as friendly as possible to the search engines and ensure the content is relevant to your target audience.

E-commerce

In case your website does not actually sell anything online, we can also refer it as Conversion Rate Optimization. Every website has a function: to generate sales or leads, business branding, as marketing tool, etc. While the first two’s primary purpose is to drive people into the website, e-commerce or conversion optimization goals are to create a better experience to the users and ultimately increase the conversion rates.

There are many ways to achieve those, depending on the your set goals. For example, if it is an online store, then it will be to sale as many items as possible. This can be achieved by implementing these:

1. Very clear call-to-action (Buy) buttons
2. Product recommendations to cross-sell
3. Product bundles to up-sell
4. Free shipping offer
5. Special promotions
6. Featured products

In order to have a successful website, aside from having a well designed website, you need to consider all components mentioned above to ensure the online channel of your business is getting the results you expected.

The post Online marketing, SEO and ecommerce: how do they differ? appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

To truly test the quality of their global market initiative, last week I placed another order. This time I used  the AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping option for the delivery with 2-4 business days for delivery. I placed the order on December 4th which was Friday and surely enough the order was immediately fulfilled and shipped on the same day using UPS Worldwide Saver.

To my pleasant surprise, on Monday (Dec 7) morning when I checked on the tracking status, the package had been received, cleared customs and out for delivery. Monday afternoon the order arrived at my door. That’s 3 days or only 1 business day, pretty amazing! I am happy and can recommend to use AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping if you really want an item in a hurry and you are willing to pay extra.

The post AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping delivers appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Countless threads have been created asking the simple question: should I use Magento or [name other popular e-commerce application]? I can very confidently answer this now: if you never had any experience managing e-commerce site, limited budget or resources, then look elsewhere. Many other e-commerce applications will save you money and headaches, while you can build up your revenue before moving to the next level.

Do not get me wrong, as stated in the beginning, I really like Magento. It opens up new possibilities of actions and automations that I could not do with previous systems I worked with before. But until you can see the limitations of other applications in your list, then keep it with lower priority in your list.

Here are a few reasons why Magento could create more problems than solution to your business requirements:

Magento requires more time and budget to develop

Given its complex nature, you cannot turn finalized HTML pages into Magento templates overnight. It involves break them into tiny blocks and combining them again through its XML-based layout file. Tons of free and premium extensions can also be very tempting, but implementation may not be as easy as adding plugins to your WordPress blog. Conflicts will be expected and your developer needs to have full knowledge in how your e-commerce site is set up in order to be able to debug effectively.

It is much harder to find good and experienced Magento developer

Unless you have very huge budget of course, in which you can just go to the best digital agency specializing in e-commerce and/or Magento development. Many developers may offer affordable budget and can actually build the site as specified, but they might sacrifice Magento’s strict rules which lead to more problems in the future. Or you could also spend a lot of money but do not get the results you expected. Bad coding will only make your site slow and vulnerable.

Related to the next point, if your developer does not have server or networking skills at all, that is another reason to look for another one. At the very least, Magento developer should be able to recommend a good configuration and setup.

Magento needs to run on a very good server

If you are not willing to spend more than $50/month, then you should forget about it. Even VPS might not be enough, depending on the traffic and how good the server is optimized. My suggestion: go with Magento optimized hosting providers. Installing and properly configuring full page cache will also improve the performance significantly.

Magento admin has long learning curve

You want to use e-commerce platform that does not require a formal training? Then Shopify is what you are looking for. Magento settings have so many layers which you can easily get lost or forget. Google is always your best friend, but if you do not want to go through the trouble just because you want to change the contact email address, then Magento is not for you. I even feel that it is not designed to be self-managed, instead you need a dedicated person to help you manage it.

Taking The Risk

All the reasons above will be worth if you have identified the restrictions of other systems and could only find it on Magento. For me, here are some:

1. You need advanced price and marketing rules. This one is very obvious. You can create extremely complex promo rules out-of-the-box, or even extend them further if needed. This is achievable because you can create multi-level conditions and actions within Magento’s Shopping Cart Price Rules.
2. Integrations with other systems. Including accounting, warehouse, fulfillment.
3. Multi store setup. This is always one of key decision factors against other systems. Magento multi store feature is very mature and deeply integrated with everything else. It is part of the framework and very solid.

Still confused of which e-commerce platform you should use? Please share it here.

The post Things to know before choose Magento appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

To do this, just look for International Shipping under Refine by and you should see a checkbox to filter the results. The cool thing is, Amazon seems to be able to detect your country even without an account. Most likely it works through IP detection.

AmazonGlobal is a program offered by the biggest e-commerce company in the world to ship orders directly from their US store/warehouse and have the customs fee estimated upfront.

The post Filter AmazonGlobal eligible items to your country appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Hari Belanja Nasional: Indonesia’s Black Friday

This all began from bombardment of online and TV ads from Lazada for “Hari Belanja Nasional” or National Shopping Day which is basically a marketing campaign by Indonesia’s big e-commerce players to promote what would be similar to Black Friday in United States. The date is December 12 (12/12). They certainly went all out for this, placing the ads during TV broadcast prime times.

Out of curiosity, I started looking at Lazada for interesting items for me to add on the wish list then wait what would happen on the big day. While not as crazy as Black Friday deals that you would see from US-based e-tailers, Lazada offered a range of coupon vouchers with values ranging from US$16-400 depending on your shopping cart total value. Not bad, enough to persuade me to become a customer.

Product Catalog

Lazada Indonesia’s product catalog is quite extensive and you can see they have managed to bring in big brands, more than enough for anyone to find something they need or want. There are 13 main categories, ranging from customer electronics to sports and outdoor. Similar to Amazon, Lazada sells items direct and also from third party merchant partners.

In overall most of the products have decent information but still very far from adequate when you are seeing them as “Amazon of South East Asia” as some media claim.

1. Minimal specification details for their electronic products. Take LED TV for instance, most of them do not have information about input/output options which is quite essential in my opinion. You have to google and find it from other sites. Guess where I got mine? Amazon.
2. Censored review. I mean in a quite extreme way. Browsing through the catalog, I probably could only find one or two products with overall rating of 3 stars. Most of the products would be 4+ stars. Basically a statement, “everything we sell is great.” When I tried to add a review, after submitting it was pending for verification. No wonder.

Placing Orders

I ended up placing three orders. One was for a Yamaha soundbar valued at around US$625. The other order was a tricycle for my nephew’s long delayed birthday gift. Both were sold by third party merchants and not stocked directly by Lazada but qualified for free shipping. Checkout process was pretty straightforward, after creating an account, it asked for shipping and billing addresses, then payment method. It offers 4 options for payment:

1. Cash of Delivery (limited area and only items sold direct by Lazada)
2. Credit Card (Visa/MasterCard)
3. Bank Transfer
4. BCA KlikPay (e-payment product from one of the biggest banks in Indonesia)

In case you are wondering about the third order, I actually had to re-order the tricycle. Details below.

Issue #1: Order Processing Time

I chose to use credit card as payment because I thought it would be most convenient for me as the customer. The bank provider sent instant SMS notification immediately after the order had been placed. That quite settled that the transaction went through without any problem. An email was sent by Lazada to confirm the order and notify that the transaction was under verification process and I would be re-notified within 24 hours when the order was ready to be shipped.

My immediate question at the time was what needed to be verified? I thought the idea of using a payment gateway to accept credit cards was for instant verification and the amount should be automatically blocked from the credit card limit. I tried to follow their rules though.

Things got bad when after 24 hours I had no follow-up and nothing had changed with the order status. Contacting their customer service through live chat did not help either. The responses were slow, probably because they were serving other customers with similar cases, and they only followed the standard of procedures when responding the inquiries. I am pretty sure I could be more patient should they were able to actually explain the cause of delay transparently.

After bugging them for 2 days, my order was finally verified and forwarded to the supplier after almost 60 hours.

Issue #2: Order Cancellation

The other issue I had was caused by a mix-up after cancelling my second order. A couple of hours after ordering the tricycle, I noticed that price dropped over 10%. I suspected the merchant had just updated the price after receiving the order. Since my order was still under “verification” status, I contacted Lazada’s customer service to check if it would still be possible to cancel my order without getting my credit card charged. She said yes and after requesting my confirmation, she cancelled it. I then re-ordered the item with the latest and lower pice.

I was quite shocked when the next day I checked on my credit card’s Internet banking that the transaction that was supposed to be cancelled was still charged into my card. It seemed that the department who handled the transactions did not pay attention to orders’ statuses and just captured all outstanding transactions.

To make things worse, when it comes to this matter the customer service was practically only the listening ears and could not provide satisfying response to my frustration. They said that cancelled orders would be refunded within 14 working days. But that was not the point, I was disappointed that the supposed to be cancelled transaction had been captured in the first place. If this is their standard of operations, I think it is certainly something that can be improved.

They eventually did things right though. To avoid further disappointment from a customer, they expedited the refund process and it was credited into my credit card balance without 48 hours. They even called to explain about the mix-up and apologize. A very simple but valuable gesture.

Will I Order Again from Lazada?

While they are still not 100% there yet, I believe they are doing the right things in terms of offerings and ensuring customer satisfaction. I would probably do a few more test orders in less busy time (for them) to truly see their standard quality in handling the orders.

Serving potentially 300 million customers in Indonesia is not an easy job, especially since most of them are not completely familiar with pure B2C e-commerce models. However if they are doing it right, they may generate more revenue than Amazon. Just look at Alibaba.

If you google about Lazada you may find many blog and forum posts, mostly in Bahasa, about some terrible experiences by customers. But I am going to give them a benefit of the doubt. Changing how the market perceives e-commerce is challenging task. It is not just about acquiring the best price, but to be able to abandon going to malls to find the products you are looking for with the assurance if they are not as good and you expected you can simply return them with not much hassle.

It will be interesting to see how far e-commerce will grow in the country in the the next few years.

The Story Behind Lazada

(Excerpted from VentureBeat)

Lazada was founded by German incubator firm Rocket Internet and claims to be Southeast Asia’s “largest online shopping mall,” which means it’s very similar to online retailer Amazon in a market that’s growing like crazy. It’s known for selling electronics, apparel, cosmetics, books, and more to customers in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other countries in the area. And like Amazon, it also offers free shipping on many items, free returns (within 14 days), and more.

Lazada has raised over US$500 million to secure its position as a dominant force in e-commerce in Southeast Asia.

The post Join The Online Revolution: Experience with Lazada Indonesia appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Estimated import charges are displayed on the product page.

I have had good experience ordering through AmazonGlobal program, but have not tried it from eBay. I am pretty sure there will be too good of a deal that I cannot afford to miss in the future though. When that happen, I will be sure to share my impressions.

Any of you has tried it? Would appreciate it if you can share your experience.

The post eBay Global Shipping prgoram to match AmazonGlobal appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting and Why You Might Need It

I say ‘might’ because you practically can install WordPress in almost any web hosting plan, that is the beauty of WordPress and one of the reasons that has made it so popular. There are a number of advantages by choosing hosting services that are customized only for WordPress. I am going to narrow them down to the top 3 reasons:

• Support. Most web hosting services do not offer support for the applications you install on their servers. Typically, your developers are responsible to enable the website or application they are developing to be able to run on the production server. Managed WordPress hostings however, have WP experts as part of their support team so they will be able to assist customers that are experiencing issues with their WP sites.
• Speed. Like any PHP CMS or application, WordPress with huge database or bloated plugins can easily exhaust the server resources and eventually add the load times. Managed WordPress hosting servers have been configured and optimized to handle these and should reduce the page load time significantly.
• Security. As the most popular PHP application, WordPress is always a tempting target to hackers and malicious scripts. While you are always responsible for the security of your own blog/site, WP hosting will be an added layer of security with by constantly monitoring your code’s health including automatic WP updates.

Budget

Specialized service comes with a more premium price, understandable because it is targeting a niche market. If you are looking for a typical $5/month hosting, then you are probably better to choose a generic shared hosting plan.

However my research goal is to offer options of managed WordPress hosting plans for personal or small business use with maximum monthly price plan of $30. Above that, unless you are making money directly from your website or it generates thousands of visitors per day, it may not be worth it in my humble opinion.

WordPress Hosting Plans Comparison

Which One to Choose?

Managed WordPress hosting has become a promising business with many companies jumping in even though the market is quite limited. Price will be the biggest factor in making a decision to switch your server or selecting one for a new project.

WPEngine was probably the first and is still one of the best option you have out there, unfortunately it is also the most expensive. Its Personal plan has limited options with no dedicated IP and SSL support.

On the other end, there is Lightning Base. While it is a relatively new name, at least to my ears, their Personal plan offer is very interesting and has most of the options I need for hosting an e-commerce WordPress projects while keeping the server budget reasonable.

Do you have other hosting suggestions? Please post your comments below.

Additional Note

Please keep in mind that choosing the best provider is only one part of getting the best performance out of your WordPress installation. Before considering to switch to another hosting, you might want to consider optimizing your WordPress site. This post is a good reference to start.

The post Best Managed WordPress Hosting for Personal and Small Business appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Their solution is called AmazonGlobal. The way it works is very simple, Amazon will send the order directly from their US store/warehouse and have the customs fee estimated upfront. This allows Amazon to ship to additional 65 countries around the world and hoping to compete with other e-commerce companies who are operating locally. I personally doubt they will be able to generate much revenue from here, compared to what they are already earning, it is more about prestige and as very early step to dominate global market.

Products Selection

It is very important to note that not all products, in fact only very small percentage of their massive catalog, which are eligible for AmazonGlobal shipping option. They are only items that are sold and shipped by Amazon.com and very likely the ones that qualify to enter by local customs.

You can also start by going to their AmazonGlobal page to browse the catalog with products that are eligible with this offer.

Ordering

I have gift certificate balance on my Amazon account. It is not a discount.

If you are already familiar with Amazon, there is nothing new here. You browse and search for the products you are looking for and add them to the shopping cart. Upon checkout, you will see the breakdown and total of your order that you will need to pay. Aside from the normally high shipping cost (from US to Indonesia), you will also find the Import Fees Deposit.

The Import Fees Deposit will be used to reimburse the carries for the import fees that they have paid on your behalf to the appropriate authorities (read: customs) of the destination country.

Amazon also offers two types of shipment:

1. AmazonGlobal Expedited Shipping (averages 5-10 business days)
2. AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping (averages 2-4 days)

My Experience

I had ordered with Amazon many times before, although usually for smaller items for direct shipping to Indonesia (without using AmazonGlobal) or asked a friend to bring it back from US during his travel there. But when I saw Philips Fidelio X1 at half the suggested retail price from $300 to $150 on Amazon’s Today’s Deals page and it was eligible for International shipping, I could not resist to order it. I threw in a Sandisk Cruzer 16GB as it almost added nothing to the shipping cost.

A total of $235.60 for $300 retail priced product, including shipping, import fees, and an extra USB stick with decent capacity. Not bad at all. Placed my order and then I waited.

Delivery

For carrier partner, Amazon worked with i-Parcel to track down the International shipment. It provided regular updates to the package, until it reached local customs. Then it was stuck for over a week, which I was not too surprised. After making several contacts with reps from i-Parcel regarding the status of customs clearance, my order finally arrived.

From the estimated delivery of 5-10 business days, it ended up to more like 20 business days which was still acceptable. It was more important for me to know the package was handled very well. The box of the headphones which was rather large was in perfect shape, no bend whatsoever or anything lost or tempered.

After nearly 6 weeks from the delivery date, I also received an email from Amazon that they had refunded an amount of $19.55 from the Import Deposit Funds. Wow, that makes the total order only $216.05!

Conclusion

Is ordering through AmazonGlobal shipping recommendable? YES, but only if you cannot find the products in your local stores or if the total price after additional fees is noticeably less than what you can grab locally.

Happy shopping!

The post AmazonGlobal: Ordering Experience appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.