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.

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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.

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!

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For years I have been trying to find the most efficient way to be able to quickly take photos using my iPhone and then send them to my iMac or Macbook Air. I do not use Dropbox Sync feature because I do not want to sync all of my photos, in fact I sometimes do not want to save the photos on my phone if possible.

Today, I find a new ‘process’ which may work in most cases for me. You still need several things though:

1. Camera+ iPhone app ($1.99)
2. Notes app set on your iPhone and Mac
3. decent Internet upload connection

Here are the steps:

1. First, you may want to go to Camera+’s menu and make sure the AutoSave is set to Lightbox
2. Take the photo(s) you need
3. From the app’s Lightbox, select the photo you would like to use, tap on Share > Create Web Link
4. It will upload the photo
5. When finished, copy the image URL (tap hold > Copy)
6. (optional) Delete the photos from Lightbox
7. Open Notes on your iPhone, create a new note, paste the copied URL
8. Open Notes on your Mac, wait a few seconds for syncing, then click on the URL
9. Done. You can drag the image from your browser for whatever you wish to do

OK, it still takes almost 10 steps, but it really is not that complicated compared to other methods I tried before.

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Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

The post Perfection appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

[syntax_prettify linenums=”0″]tar -zxvf file.tar.gz[/syntax_prettify]

Extract uncompressed file:

[syntax_prettify linenums=”0″]tar -xvf file.tar[/syntax_prettify]

Takes everything from folder_to_be_archived/ and puts it into archived_filename.tar:

[syntax_prettify linenums=”0″]tar -cf archived_filename.tar folder_to_be_archived/[/syntax_prettify]

The post Archiving Commands via SSH appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

One inconvenient thing that might prevent you to do an update immediately is it cannot auto-update (WordPress style), so you need to manually reupload the necessary files. Official documentation from Interspire to upgrade your ISC installation can be found here.

Following the instructions there is the safest method for sure. But if you do not have the super fast connection via FTP to your server, overwriting the files one by one might take at least a few hours. So I tried to find with a faster way with the help of SSH. Let’s start.

Preparation

Make sure you have done the followings:

1. Backup your store’s database and files.
2. Read the changelog.txt file from the latest update to know which template files that need to be updated.
3. If you changed or customized the system files, you might want to reprogrammed some of the files first.

Step 1: Rename your current ISC folder

By default, the store folder is named ‘shoppingcart’. You can rename it to ‘shoppingcart-old’. If it is on your root folder, you can create a new folder and move everything there.

Step 2: Upload and unzip the update file

You can use FTP to do this. Then using SSH, unzip the file:

unzip Interspire_Shopping_Cart_(Edition)-5.x.x.zip

The folder can be renamed after unzipped.

Step 3: Copy product images folder

This folder contains all the product images that you have uploaded, so it is very important to keep it intact. First you need to rename the ‘product_images’ folder from the new system folder. Then go to your old store folder and copy the ‘product_images’ folder:

cp -r product_images ../shoppingcart/

Step 4: Copy the template folder (if you use custom theme)

Go to ‘templates’ subfolder, find your custom template name:

cp -r CustomThemeFolder ../../shoppingcart/templates/

Step 5: Finalize the upgrade

From here, ISC upgrade script will take care of the rest. Just open your ISC admin URL, then it will do the database upgrade and all necessary steps.

Done.

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