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De-Skin A Leather Jacket – Tutorial

Leather Jacket Fish Lennon Commando Fishmonger

You may be wondering why a leather jacket fish is called a Leather Jacket. You will have your question answered by watching this video:

#CommandoFishmonger, Mr. Lennon Ang, will show you how it is done.

#Wikipedia – The leather jacket fish or leather jack, is a species of jack in the family Carangidae. The Carangidae is a family of fish which includes the jacks, pompanos, jack mackerels, runners, and scads. The largest leather jack is about a foot long. Its length averages about 3.5 times the width.

Did you know?  Leather jacks live in shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico and southern Atlantic coast. Also, it is found in Australian waters, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. All leather jacks species have no scales and are covered in a leather-like skin or jacket!

The texture of the fish is firm, comes in thick chunks of meat which don’t contain small bones. It’s very affordable for home cooking.

Enjoy!

Setting up an eCommerce Business

ecommerce-wordpress-woocommerce

Over the past 20 months, I have helped a few business owners transform their brick & mortar businesses in to click & order enterprises.  You can either use Shopify, Shopmatic or any other paid, template based eCommerce solutions or you can build it from scratch like I did using WordPress + WooCommerce.  Either way, you will need to grab a decent domain name that represents your business.

STEP 1:  Getting a Domain Name
I used namecheap.com to secure my web domain name.  I personally recommend using a dot.com domain vs a dot.sg domain because it is easier to set up (may save you weeks of pain) and provides higher perceived value (more international).  You can also purchase it via your webhost (see Step 2 for details).

STEP 2:  Hosting your website
If you are using paid, template based eCommerce solutions like Shopify, you can skip Step 1 & 2, as these steps are integrated when you sign up their subscriptions.

I am using ua.siteground.com as my webhost as they are pretty efficient on customer support and priced reasonably.  More importantly, they provide good security and free SSL.  You may also consider buying your domain name as a package with Siteground if you have not done so in Step 1.

STEP 3:  Installing WordPress on your website
Once Step 1 & 2 is completed, you will need a content management system to house your business content.  I used WordPress because it is open-source (FREE) and it is one of the easiest to build upon.  Go to the cPanel of your webhost, you should be able to see the WordPress icon under Autoinstaller (if you are using Siteground).

You will be prompted to create an Admin ID & Password.  This will be used for your website login in the next step.  In the same location, you can start creating emails linked to your domain name which will be hosted by Siteground as well.

STEP 4:  Installing WooCommerce Plugin
Once you have completed Step 3, you should be able to login to your (WordPress-installed) website via the following URL:

http://domain-name.com/wp-admin

Use your Admin ID & Password set up earlier, you can now login to the “back-end” of your website to start building your online store.  Head to Plugins -> Add New and search for WooCommerce.  Click install and activate plugin.  Once done, you will see an additional item on your left column of your WordPress “back-end”.


As you can see, it is a relatively simple process.  As long as you have the guts to make mistakes, you will find the above steps easy to follow.  If you are interested to render my service to build an eCommerce website for you, let me know.

E-Payment Gateways

There are tons of eCommerce gurus out there who can teach you how to build eCommerce sites in a matter of minutes but may not share with you the mechanics of the E-Payment gateways used to transact the orders placed on your site.  As a relatively “newbie” in eCommerce (20 months and counting), I just want to share my knowledge on three E-Payment gateways I used.  I am not saying one is better than the other, but this will give you a better idea which you can use for your business purpose.

The three E-Payment gateways I have tried are:
1. PayPal
2. SmoovPay
3. Stripe

Here’s a snapshot on the features I identified for comparison:

ServicePayPalSmoovPayStripe
Setup FeesFreeFreeFree
Monthly FeesFreeFreeFree
Selling Fees3.4% + S$0.50 (or less)2.9% + S$0.25 (or less)3.4% + S$0.50 (or less)
Accept American ExpressSame rate as other cards for Standard; 3.5% for Pro or AdvancedSame rate as other cardsSame rate as other cards
Subscription CollectionYesNoYes
Chargebacks$28FreeS$25 (approx)
RefundsFreeFreeFree
WithdrawalFree> S$500 (FREE)Free
International cards1% to accept funds, *plus 2.5% currency conversion feeFree to accept funds,*plus 2% currency conversion feeFree to accept funds,*plus 2% currency conversion fee
Card Verification TransactionsS$0.50FreeFree
*Fee only applies if you charge in SGD.

As I am using Woocommerce for my eCommerce sites, it comes with PayPal as an E-Payment gateway, so the setting up is quite easy.  And when it failed to accept a particular transaction via its PayPal Express Checkout (non-PayPal users who wants to pay via their Credit Cards), I decided to research further on Stripe.  I must say the the instructions provided to set up Stripe was quite a breeze as it was already available as an extension on WooCommerce.

SmoovPay is made in Singapore and I must say it is definitely a cheap and good alternative to PayPal and Stripe.  It does not allow “recurring subscription” at the moment which can be a bummer for “Paying Membership Sites”.  I have not integrated SmoovPay in all the sites I built except one.  Reason: Can only withdraw for Free if amount above S$500.

If you would like  to learn more about the respective E-Payment gateways, you can click on the links below:
1.  PayPal.com
2.  Smoovpay.com
3.  Stripe.com

Stay tuned for more updates!  🙂