Kategorie: General Topics

Looks like our credit card used for our own US orders has charged us a wrong exchange rate for an oder payed on the first of November.
Their price-list says they would use the mastercard exchange rate and where to look it uo. However that gives a different rate for that date then the one they actually charged.

We noticed a fairly stupid (failed) hacking attemp in our server by placing an order with code-injection.

Analysis

It’s a simple and fairly bad attempt to get the shop to download and execure some PHP-malware.
The malware is very generic and probably just off-the-shelf.
The attempt was very rudimentary and made in a way that would instantly come to attention.
So this was in no way targeted and is probably attempted with thousands of shops in an automated way.

Response

We informed the abuse department of the domain registrar used to download the malware from.
We also added the existing captcha also to the account-creation process.
Obviously we did check the log files, security scanner report and that indeed all patches against known issues (security relevant or not) hava already been applied.
We also enabled an „invisible“ Google ReCaptcha V3 in addition to the existing server-side captcha for account-creation and deleted a large number of similar accounts created by harmless bots in the past.

The strike of Royal Mail will not happen at least in the next two weeks.
Limitations with shipping to UK customers are thus lifted.

There is a strike next weeks at Royal Mail. Details can be found here.
Shipments to the UK could be delayed at least from the 2nd until the 4th of November.
There could also be more strikes to follow in the weeks after. Details will be published here.

Paypal is increasing it’s fees from 2.5% to 3.0%.

Due to PSD II regulations, we are not allowed to charge a fee associated with any one payment mechanism. So normally this would force up to increase all prices, even when paying with a credit card (1.4%), by bank transfer (0.10€/100 transactions) or in cash at events (free).
Since we already had to increase so many prices due to the EUR/USD exchange rate falling, we opted to instead only remove the Paypal express checkout button from the shopping cart for the time being. A permanent solution can hopefully wait until the current crisis is over.

Update

We checked again and while the LG Munic ruled that we can’t do that for Paypal. later the higher OLG Munic ruled (10.10.2019 Az. 29 U 4666/18) that we are allowed to charge fee for using Paypal as long as the fee is not higher then the fee Paypal charged to us.
There is also a 2001 ruling of the highest court (BGH) with the same verdict.
So starting 1st of August 2020 we may do that.

For a while we intentionally didn’t restock any standard lubes while only keeping white Wolf Cum Lube and cheap Bovivet for rubber parties in stock.
Er figured that you could get them anywhere and this wasn’t why any of you would visit a specialty shop like ours.
As an experiment we have added them back in for a while to order along with any toys.

First and foremost: No prices change for EU countries and the UK.

For a long list of non-EU countries and even entire zones of countries DHL has started to drastically increase it’s crisis-premiums per kilogramm.
The premiums are on top of the regular price and range from 50ct/Kg+VAT for China to 3,7€/Kg+VAT for Australia.

The change takes effect on the 15th of April.

We will upload the new prices to the shop software next week, to ensure that all parcels shipped after we return from the TailsUp furmeet in our event-calendar have the new prices.