Help Articles Archives - Page 2 of 3

Top up any amount to use your Qoo10 Cart Coupon

Qoo10 has been giving out cart coupons every other day and I really enjoy using them to buy diapers, milk powder and other household items. There’s just one small problem. Sometimes I’m just short of 20 cents to hit the minimum cart amount. I definitely do not want to buy another tin of milk powder just to fulfill the 20 cents. Sometimes it could be 10 cents, 25 cents, 99 cents short, it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is to use a “Coupon Top Up” service. This coupon top up service allows you to add a dummy item to cart at whatever cost you want (minimum 10 cents). You will not get anything from them but you WILL be able to then easily proceed with your order quickly.

Here’s a simple guide using a real order I made just now:

As you can see, I was short of 20 cents to be eligible to use the $20 coupon!

With this special “fake item”, I was able to choose to add 20 cents to my cart total. The base amount is 10 cents so just add 2 of the item with option “None” (No top up). If you need 25 cents, simply add 1 item with None as option and another item with 5 cents option to give you a total of 25 cents.

With this, it just costs me 20 cents to enable to use of my $20 coupon.

Remove yellow background in Google Adsense Responsive Ads

If you have implemented the responsive Google Adsense code into your website or blog, you may notice that some ad formats introduces an unwanted yellow background to fill the area that is not covered by the ad.

Refer to the example on the right. The ad format is smaller than the width of my main blog column and Google decided to just fill it in with a strange yellow fill. Is there a way to get rid of it? Yes! And thankfully, WordPress made it really easy for you to do it by simply inserting a custom piece of CSS via the WordPress interface!

The first thing you’ll have to do is to log in to your wordpress. Mine is a self hosted WordPress instance but it shouldn’t differ too much. Once you are logged in, you should see the usual administrative black bar on top of your site. Click on “Customize”.

A sidebar will now appear. Somewhere near the bottom, there will be a menu item called “Additional CSS”. Clicking on that will produce a large edit box for you to insert custom CSS code. Paste the following code into it:

ins.adsbygoogle { background: transparent !important; }

The “!important” syntax tells the site to override the original CSS by Google. This will make the yellow background disappear. Good luck!

Oh, what if you are not using WordPress? Simply insert this into your html page’s header within <style> tags.

How to start an Online Store in Singapore

This is not meant to be a full tutorial but I aim to give you a general sense of what to expect. Some of you will ask me why bother creating your own Online Store when there are so many Online marketplaces in Singapore such as Lazada, Qoo10, Shopee, Carousell, etc. Well, there are several reasons:

Unfair competition. On a marketplace site, you tend to have to fight with competitors trying to price you out. They could be selling counterfeit stuff or parallel import stuff that is not exactly the same as what you sell and they “won” by simply being cheaper.
Commission and fees. Apart from Carousell and Shopee, most marketplace platforms charge you commission and/or fees ranging from 7% to 13%. Some platforms like Lazada will even penalise you with fines if you did not manage to ship out your goods within 24 hours from the time of order. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in shipping orders out at the earliest opportunity. However, we are adults and we should be able to be responsible for our own customers’ satisfaction.
You should not build your ship at someone else’s port. You are at the mercy of the marketplace platform’s policies when you use their services. Should there be a day where the marketplace decide to shut down your shop due to policy changes or disagreement, the following you have built on that marketplace will be lost forever.

So it should now be clear that building your own online store is the way to go. You must be wondering what kind of effort it takes right? Generally, there are two ways you can “own” an Online Store.

Use an e-commerce provider like Shopify. I used Shopify for almost 2 years. The experience was great because you pay a monthly fee and they take care of everything like site security, provides you with a idiot-proof interface for you to upload your products, choose themes, etc – very much like WordPress. You can register a domain, like my Tupperware Online Store – http://tup.sg, which is my unique online identity. Although you will still be at their mercy when it comes to policies and stuff, at least you can migrate to another service together with your domain and keep your traffic and branding. What you need to do:
- Sign up for Shopify
- Register a domain (The cost will depend on the domain type and registrar you use. Typically ranges from $18 per year to $50 per year)
- Point the domain to Shopify based on their instructions
- Choose your theme, set up shipping options, set up payment gateway(s), upload your products, start selling!
Subscribe to your own web hosting account and do everything on your own. This is slightly more advanced but most of the difficult steps are one-time setups which you can engage people like me to help. If you want to try it yourself, here’s a glimpse of what you need to do:
- Sign up for a web hosting account (USD$3.95 per month)
- Register a domain (The cost will depend on the domain type and registrar you use. Typically ranges from $18 per year to $50 per year)
- Point the domain to your host
- Set up SSL using Let’s Encrypt (Free)
- Install Magento / WordPress with Woocommerce / Prestashop / Opencart / osCommerce / simpleCart, etc (I suggest WordPress with Woocommerce)
- Choose your theme, set up shipping options, set up payment gateway(s), upload your products, start selling!

As you may have noticed, doing it on your own with just a USD$3.95 web hosting account is just slightly more troublesome at first. Once you get past the setup, you will never need to pay anyone commission fees, be subjected to ridiculous policies and be locked-in to a particular service provider.

If you need help setting up an Online Store, reach out to me at howard@hj.sg