Kategorie: Behind the scenes

As every year, we are required to license the packaging material for 2025 and report on 2024.

The System

A boring task but this is how the „free“ yellow recycling bags in Germany are paid for and what makes the blue paper-bins so „cheap“. The businesses that buy or import packaging material pay for it. So the people who can make a change have an incentive to do so.
Being in Germany however, this means doing all of that twice. With the agency we pay for recycling and identical reports with the government agency.

Fees

Since we have so little material to recycle, we always pay the minimum fee and get way, way more then is actually needed. Especially since almost all our material is easy to recycle cardboard (that usually comes out of recycling already).
So we never run the risk of licensing too little cardboard boxes and plastic bags.
These reports are made in tonnes. Not Kilograms.

Statistics

In the early years, we had very conservative estimates based on the packaging material we purchased.
Nowadays we have some statistics to calculate these numbers from the actual orders placed throughout the year.

2024 we used 25% LESS cardboard/paper and plastic bags then the year before.
For 2025 we have licenced more then the most busy year in our statistics. Just to be on the save side.

First of all: Paypal and SEPA bank transfers in the EU work just fine.

Due to ongoing issues with cancelled credit card payments due to „The customer returned from Stripe and changed the cart details.“,
we have now switched from redirecting to a payment page hosted by Stripe to having the credit card payment embedded.

So far Stripe support can’t see anything wrong on their side and we don’t see anything out of the ordinary on our side. So let’s hope this randomly solves the elusive issue.

Christmas is over and so is the DHL „peak-surcharge“.
The BREXIT surcharge ends too.
Just the CO2 surcharge has increased slightly from 0.18 to 0.19€/Kg .

We have just entered the new prices into the YiffyToys shop system.

First: Paypal works fine.

Two different customer seem to have had issues with credit card payments.
We are currently checking out a new payment-module by our credit-card processor in our test-shop.
If it works, we can install it on the live shop later.

It seems that the page-cache of the shop overflowed it’s storage capacity during the night.
So the shop stopped serving pages and everyone got an error message.

We have cleared the cache and installed an hourly warning if this is about to happen again.

Sorry

We have just tested an update to our shop software in the test-system.
For updating the live shop it will be offline for a few minutes.
We don’t expect there to be any issues.