I have stop writting about online shopping reviews for quite a while and decided to resume it again. The third review is on Bebe.com. I started to shop at Bebe only from Jan 2011 and this is my 4th purchase. I will be adding some pros and cons in the review from now on..

Shipping: Although Bebe offers direct shipping back to Singapore and I found that it is much cheaper to ship via VPOST. It takes about 5 days with Bebe Standard shipping to arrive at my Vpost USA and another 5 to 7 days for Vpost to deliver to me.

Quality of clothing: Overall, Bebe clothing is good in quality. I have ordered some of their signature logo T-shirts and they are sparkling gorgeous. However the white color logo shirts is too sheer to my liking. If the fabric can be made slightly thicker and it will be perfect.

My most recent purchase include a nice black lace top as shown below, the quality of the fabric is pretty good.

I also bought the following Rhinestone Bow Watch Cuff and Snake Clasp Bracelet, they are beautifully sparkling in all angles, especially the Snake Clasp Bracelet, I can see it sparkle in rainbow colors. They look much nicer than in the pictures. I always wanted to buy a snake bracelet from Bebe but it usually sold out pretty fast before I make my move. LOL, finally grasped one!

Here I would like to relate an incident regarding my recent purchase which I am completely satisfied with Bebe customer service. During the checkout process, I encountered difficulty in entering a free shipping code(which I received from Bebe on my 3rd purchase), despite trying to enter the code a few times, the system did not recognized it. I went ahead to place the order and immediately after the order confirmation, I emailed the customer service regarding the issue, at the same time, I requested my items to be packed in the “smallest” possible box.

One day later, the bebe customer service replied that they will refund the shipping fee to me. With regards to the packaging of my order, they have passed my request along to their shipping department.

Pros: Good customer service. Bebe customer service listened to customer’s requests and complaints and addressed them promptly and efficiently, thumbs up!

Cons: Bebe usually pack items in a big box but they take in request to pack into a smaller package and hence this is no longer a con.

Cons: Direct international shipping fee is very expensive. Hope that Bebe can consider lowering their international shipping cost in order to be more competitive. For example, Saks Fifth Avenue has recently offers $19.99 USD Flat Rate Shipping to selected countries(including Singapore) on orders of $99 USD and more, this is indeed a very attracting shipping fee to international customers.

Conclusion: I am a total Bebe loyal customer and will continue to shop at Bebe.com.

Stay tuned for more online shops reviews…

The second review is on Victoria’s Secret. I shopped less frequent at VS but started my first purchase on Aug 2008. The reason is simply they don’t add in new stock frequently as compared to RalphLauren.com.

Shipping: VS provide direct shipping back to Singapore and I find that it is much cheaper to ship direct rather than using a 3rd party shipping like VPOST.
Initially the items took more than 2 weeks to reach me but over the time, the shipping improved and took about 10 days.

Quality of clothing: Sweaters are pretty good in material wise and I really love their styles especially the sweaterdresses. I simply can’t resist my temptation and have recently bought this dress(see picture below) even though I might not be able to wear it now in my humid and warm country.

I love their shirts which are in cotton/spandex and it is very comfortable and fitting. Below are those that I have purchased recently.

Their blouse/bra top are not bad too but my advice is not to choose those very light color like white. I have bought a white polo dress and have never wore it once(guess will not wear it at all) because it give me that kind of “naked” look as the inner wear can be seen through.

Conclusion: I would come back to shop becasue of the generous discount sometimes and for those lovely shirts and sweaters. But I do wish that Victoria’s Secret can frequently update new range of clothing in future which they don’t seem to have improved over these years.

The first one that I am going to review is Ralph Lauren. I have been a regular to this site since 2008. During the 1st year, everything from shipping to the quality of clothes were perfect. Shipping has always be fast and satisfactory. But things started to turn sour since the begining of this year.

I bought a tight skirt on Jan and when I received my item, there was dirt visible on it. So without hesitation, I hand washed it immediately. To my horror the black dye ran like mad under the running tap. The light yellow part of the skirt was stained with the black dye and as you can imagine, the whole skirt was in terrible condition. I didn’t even have a chance to wear it for once. I had taken a few pictures and sent them to the RL customer service. During that time I did receive a prompt and courtesy reply from them. The customer service requested the item to be sent back for inspection. After checking with my local post service provider, I realized the cost of sending back the item to US was expensive, even more expensive than I were to buy another piece of the skirt. I wrote back to explain the whole situation to RL. As a courtesy, a credit for the skirt have been issued back to me.

Well, at that time I just wondered why did such a big and reputable shop has such an under-sight on their part, to not run through a more thorough quality inspection. Nevertheless I continued to have faith in Ralph Lauren and still shop with them regularly after this incident.

So, things went fine for a few more purchases but the horror began on September. Sigh!

There was a sale on September and my best friend wanted to buy a few clothing from RL as well, we combined our order as one and I was the one who make the purchase. When the items finally reached us, all were in good condition except a white shirt which my friend ordered for her hubby. We had not yet opened it from the wrapping plastic bag, the bag itself was already being cut with a big hole as shown in pictures below.

What could I say? Am I always the unlucky one to receive such a bad quality which slipped out from a supposed to be tight quality controlled big shopping giant like Ralph Lauren? Also, we noticed that all the 3 pieces of clothes(those good one) have a “QA inspected” sticker on them(on the plastic wrapper) EXCEPT the defected shirt. Therefore this appears to me that somehow that defected piece got slip out from RL usual QC check and reached the unlucky me! Again, I sent in the photos to file a complaint to the RL customer service. But in this mail, I have indicated that we have no intention to send back the item due to the high shipping cost back and forth and we were deeply disappointed but rendered this to our bad luck.

This time, added to my disappointment, there was a 2-line reply 3 days after I have sent in the mail, like these:

CustomerAssistance@RalphLauren.com 1-888-475-7674
Visit us at www.RalphLauren.com

Can anyone imagine how would I feel at that moment? It was an indeed bad customer service, not only bad but rude! I guess we at least deserve a sincere apology from RL for sending out something which apparently did not pass the quality check. I wrote back and voiced out my disappointment with lines like these: “Although we do not expect anything from RalphLauren.com BUT we do expect an apology from RalphLauren.com to address such a negligence/lack of careful inspection on your side before the purchased items are being sent out to the customer . And may be an assurance of better quality inspection for any future order.
Since this appears to us that it might be some human-made mistake during your packing process, we decided to bite the bullet by not asking for an exchange as it will probably cost us a shipping price that is higher than the shirt itself. However we still sent in the complaint and hope that RalphLauren.com will make some clarification and apologize on this issue. Instead, what we received are just 2 lines of links without a human touch, “cold” and short.”

It was then after the above mail was sent, I received a reply with short apology from RL. These comes rather late to me. I was deeply disappointed.

Well, both my friend and I are not those picky type and we understand the risk of online shopping. Some minor flaws here and there are acceptable as long as the clothes are still wearable. However in both cases above, the skirt and the shirt were absolutely not wearable at all.

Conclusion: I have always be a loyal customer of Ralph Lauren as I truly like the design of their clothing but after these 2 separate incidents which indicate “emerging” poor quality inspection , I indeed lose some faith in RL. It is really a hard decision whether to continue shopping with them and at the same time have worry whenever I make a new purchase. Or am I the only unlucky soul out there? Sigh!

Next will write on Victoria Secret, stay tuned..

Before I start, I would like to emphasize that this is solely based on the view point of a designer regarding the template system and not on a standpoint of an owner. Why would I say so? Well, for owner or anyone else who wish to open a webshop and start selling right away, webshop v5.5 is a good start, simply because the ease of use as most of the settings are controlled in the admin panel. There are a number of default templates and styles that one can set easily with very little knowledge of html programming. As far as I can see, this webshop is rather popular with its Danish clients.

But on a designer point of view, it is really a pain in terms of programming and setting up custom templates here and there. As I mentioned earlier, most settings, including templates, css styles and add-on modules has to be done via admin panel. The codes are pretty messy as the system auto-inserts quite a number of redundant codes which in returns, designer will need to find ways to "hide" it in order not to disrupt with the intended design. An example is that many non-semantic "<span>" tags are added un-neccessary here and there and therefore efforts need to be taken if a block level element is required here, either by changing its’ default display property with css or doing a small "hack" of "un-span" and "re-span" later in between the block level elements that one intend to insert.

In addition, this system is "table" codes based and hence messy nested table are seen every where. I have to close one eye on my developer tool "HTML tidy" sitting right at the bottom of Firefox window where warnings statistics show up with a flying color. To name a few: "<html>" and "<body>" tags can appear in the middle of some content pages, styles declared inside <td> elements etc..

Finally I survive through the design and implementation phases by significantly lowering down my expectation towards producing a design that passes W3C validation with warning and error free. And most of all, with great patience. Giving me a choice, Zen-cart is still my preferred option so far.

Well, I decided not to give up and try to find an alternative to add a video playlist again. And after much effort of trying, including accidentally deleted my whole iPod contents, I manage to add video playlists successfully from now onwards. Below are the detail steps of how to do it, well, quite some works but I guess it does pay off when come to enjoy the continuous video playing(or even shuffle)on my iPod Touch later.

One very important info pointed out by commenter Mikmor: all the steps below are referring to iPod software version 2 or higher, btw, the 1st snapshot has shown clearly of my software version, if anyone would notice.

Step 1: you need to set up iTunes to automatically sync with the iPod. In my case, I still wish to have some control over the “Fully automatic sync”, hence under the main option page, I tick the checkbox of “Sync only checked songs and videos. See snapshot below.

Caution: Make sure you have already backup all your music and videos in your computer before you attempt this! This is for those who have manually manage your iPod like what I did previously, I need to un-tick “Manually manage music and videos”. Once this option is un-checked, iTunes will prompt a message saying all content on iPod will be replaced by content in existing iTunes library. When I did that, hmm… all my entire 3.5G of music and video on my iPod were wiped off completely.

Well, previously I stored my videos in another folder outside the iTunes folder, it is understood that all video content will be wiped off; the strange part is, it even wiped off my music and other music playlists which were already in iTunes Music folder. There is basically no other option to safe-guard this before I un-checked the “Manually manage..” option. So do it at your own risk, Well, the worst situation(in my case) is just to transfer back all my videos and music from my computer back to iPod. Therefore, if you don’t have any backup of your iPod contents on your computer, find a way to back it up first, search in google and you will find tons of utilities out there but this is out of the topic here.

After you have setup above option correctly, the Music and Movies option are setup automatically like following snapshots.

Step 2: Add your videos(if you have not done that previously) into the iTunes Library, all videos will be automatically grouped under the “Movies” folder like this:

Step 3: Right-click on the movie and click on “Get Info”. Then select the 3rd tab “Video”. By default videos added here will be tagged as “Movie”, change the video kind to “Music Video”(see picture below). Click Next to do the same thing to the rest of the videos, once you finish tagging all to music video, click OK and all the videos will disappear from this Movie Library section. Don’t panic, they are all added inside the Playlist of Music Video now.

Note: For iPod software version 2.1, the video kind can be changed under the “Option” tab inside “Get Info” window.

Step 4: Refer to picture above: You should be able to see all your videos under the “Music Video” playlist now. Now, click on to the lower left most “+” button of iTunes windows to add in your custom playlist, you can also use File->New playlist to add it.

Step 5: Open up “Music Video” playlist now, select the videos that you would like to group them under your new playlist. Right-click on a video, scroll down to “Add to Playlist” and select your custom playlist that you have just created on the fly out window as shown as picture below(I trimmed off all other videos just to give a clearer view).

Step 6: Click on to “Devices” and start the Sync now. Voila, you should be able to see the video playlist that you have just created in your iPod after the sync is completed.

Hope this post will help many iPod Touch fans out there who are lost and clueless of how to create a video playlist. Cheers!

Talking about the dreaded “Table” coding, Zen cart has moved away from this since version 1.3.5(well – nearly table-less layout). osCommerce is table-based and codes are pretty messy(to me) where I had to mix around with table and css based div.

Another feature that I like is the template overrides system in Zen cart: you can customize your cart by creating your own custom template folder instead of writing to the default templates and thus any future upgrades will not overwrite the customized theme design. See snapshot below.

With osCommerce, there were several projects that I need to edit over 100 files manually just to integrate my design into the modified templates. That was indeed a tedious task editing all those pages manually even though I did use the “Find and Replace” feature from Dreamweaver.

At the point of writting, I would say that I prefer Zen cart over osCommerce in terms of ease of the template customization. Will post further findings after I have completed and uploaded the new Zen cart designs later.

More resources:

• Zen cart features
• Zen cart official site
• osCommerce official site

Karmaloop: Bought “The Sushi Adios & Ciao Ciao T-Shirt” and “The True Love Ciao Ciao & Adios Z/U Hoody” here(see pictures below).

The Hoody already has 28% savings on it. On top of that you can use this discount code: CG23109 to get a 20% off of your first purchase at Karmaloop and 10% off of every other purchase. This coupon code will never expires! Further more the 20% discount is applicable even with the already discounted sale items. However, take note that if your rep code is used with another promo code, the discount amount will only be 1%.

This shop processed the order very fast. The shipping took only 2 days via DHL ground, it is the fastest among all the 5 shops.

Conclusion: I would definitely come back for more becasue of the generous discount and the speed of order processing. But I do wish that Karmaloop can frequently update new stock on tokidoki products in the future.

The Giant Peach : Bought 3 Nautical clothings here(see pictures below). This is the only shop I know that carries the latest Tokidoki clothings. I love the new Nautical themes so much and could not bear to wait any longer. The shipping took 3 days due to the shop location is much nearer to my shipping destination in USA.

Conclusion: This shop is the fastest to stock up the latest Tokidoki themes clothing. I wish that they can at least absord the local shipping cost if certain purchase amount is reached.

Read Tokidoki online shops reviews Part 1 »

View my others tokidoki collection?

Tobi: The LA Storm T-shirt was bought here. The whole shopping cart system is smooth and efficient. The Tobi stylists, Catherine and Rachel were indeed very prompt on replying my emails and friendly. The shipping took 5 days.

Conclusion: I would definitely come back for a second time. A final thought is that I wish Tobi can add in more new tokidoki products in the future.

Chicki: The Tokidoki Pink Bag was bought here. The shopping cart system has bug? I could not go through the entire transaction properly, at time I was login in, click on any link on site and the next second I was log out from the system again. Vicky from Chicki was very helpful and prompt in answering all my doubts where I have posted my comment here. The shipping took 6 days.

Conclusion: Usually I would not even consider buying anything from a poor shopping cart system but this is an exceptional case. I have read many compliments about this site and on Vicky, therefore I decided to go ahead to make an order via email. Everything from invoice to payment went through smoothly and fast. Vicky told me that the site will be updating the cart system soon and I hope this cart system problem would be able to resolve soon.

Trendystar: When I make the purchase here till checkout, there was no indication whether the shirt that I ordered was out of stock. I received a mail after the transaction went through, saying that it would be backorder for about a week and asked
if I could wait. Well, frankly speaking, I was not so happy but decided to go through anyway. Shipping took 5 days after the stock arrived. The email replies were not friendly, no addressing of my name(lol, I like polite people).

Conclusion: You bet if I want to make another purchase again?

Read the Tokidoki online shops reviews Part 2 »

View my tokidoki collection?

As usual the ZoneAlarm has informed me about the latest update of build 70_462_000, I have in fact having trouble to update it since the build of 70_362_000. Every time it hung my system after the installation and I have to boot up to safe mode to uninstall it. I had to revert back to the older version every time this happen. Therefore after build number 70_362_000, I have decided to give this a halt and wait for next new update. And there it was, the latest 70_462_000. That was the day where my nightmare has begun.

I installed the latest build and the same old scenario happened all over again, installed and system hung, restart several times and system still unstable, finally after the 4th attempts, I went into safe mode again to uninstall it and re-installed the older version again. To my horror, the next day when I tried to open my Photoshop, an error window popped up and said: Your Adobe Photoshop® user name, organization, or serial number is missing or invalid. The application cannot continue and must now exit.

I was panic and not sure what to do(I didn’t suspect ZoneAlarm at that time), search the web to find out if anyone has the same issue, the arrow all pointed at Adobe. So I decided to uninstall my whole Creative Suite and start afresh. I was even more panic this time to find out under the Add/remove program, there weren’t any “Remove/Change” buttons for most of my installed softwares, this included all Adobe softwares. Well the first thought was to call Adobe support. I called up the the tech support 4 times, each time they direct me to tried out different things to try to resolve the problem. Well, all efforts had no avails. I was desperate and helpless. Can anyone imagine a day without Photoshop in a web designer life? A total disaster to me!

I continue searching on the web again, and this time, trying to find out more about the missing “Remove/Change” button of the Add/remove program. To my surprise, I was not the first one who had such problem, I searched further and found out that someone has encountered the exact same situation after a bad installation of ZoneAlarm. Aha, the culprit found! So it was none of Adobe’s fault. But how can I resolve this problem? I was pulling my hair at the time. I could not find any good solution from the web then I come to a conclusion that I have to bite the bullet and re-install my Windows XP, the worst case, reformat my computer.

On day 3 when I started to put in my system XP installation disc, there came another problem, lol, the installation could not proceed and it said that my CD drive was not found. My gosh! I landed up in calling the Dell support this time. The Dell support staff Raymond was very supportive and patience(thank you Raymond), he suggested I should do a clean reformat of my hard disk instead of just reinstall my OS(where my motive was to reduce the process of the system installation to minimal), while he was guiding me along and waiting for the computer start and restart, I was grumbling about the whole process of re-formating the drive/reinstall the OS and all other devices drivers etc, then this brilliant guy stop me for a new suggestion. He recalled that my system does come with the Symantec snap shot of the factory setting which can restore my computer to the default factory setting state. He said this would only take about 15 mins and of course I was extremely happy and accepted his advice. And while doing the steps, well, in fact there was only 1 key to press:Ctrl+F11 when the computer startup, lol and it took only about 5 mins or so, the whole system restarted and default back to the brand new setting as when I first received the computer. Of course all my data were gone but I had already make a backup before doing all this. This save me a great amount of time to re-install the OS and all other drivers. What a relief, the Add/remove program problem was of course resolved. Most important, the installation of Adobe products went through like a breeze.

Well, no more nightmare and sleepless night and this also means that I will avoid ZoneAlarm from now, at least for a long long time…

Hope this help to provide some info for anyone who has the similar problem. You are welcome to post your thoughts here.

Wizz RSS News Reader is an excellent RSS Firefox extension where you can open it as a sidebar with a customizable shortcut key. You can organize your news feeds into categories and channels. The other reason that I like most is without the hassle of logging onto any account to read the feeds, it is browser based(only for Firefox), whenever I want it, just with a touch of Alt+Q key, toggle it to shut it down, what a breeze to use! If you are the one who tend to use different PC to browse the net, you can always sign up an account to save your feed list on the their server, which you can then access the feeds from any PC.