Looks like our German business bank ends the service where we can deposit cash earnings from conventions and furmeets.
We’ll have to see about alternatives.
Bank ends cash handling service
Post-Eurofurence Inventory count
The most dreaded task every year.
Counting the inventory when we return from Eurofurence.
Because it means pulling all the boxes we just shelved out again to be counted.
This doesn’t always mean having less of a toy then we thought but often enough one more then what the computer says. Things to get misplaced, especially when travelling with a metric ton on dildos to literally the other side of the country.
The 3 biggest manufacturers are done, so we can place our orders to restock.
All the other ones will come during the week.
One at a time.
expensive Twitter/X API prices
We have two WordPress plugins to automatically post updates to X and to Mastodon.
The X (formerly Twitter) plugin wanted an updates API token to work with the new V2 X API.
Doing that we found out that we have been automatically set into the „Basic“ developer account for 100USD/Month instead of the „Free“ account.
Luckily we detected this move by X before the first invoice.
taxes and blood pressure
Nothing gets your blood pumping then finding a critical software bug in your commercial accounting software while doing the taxes.
In this case some sales would be booked as credit instead of debit.
This seems to no longer happen with new entries but existing entries have not been automatically corrected (or the user informed about it), when this bug was fixed.
Just editing the respectig entries and saving them without making any actual change did fix them. Being a small business, this was „just“ about a hundred entries.
For the laymen:
This is something that should be absolutely impossible for any double entry accounting software. Both sides of the transaction no longer added up to zero. The money you take from A no longer matches the money you deposit in B and C.
We found this by chance because it happened often enough to result in one part of our income being reported as negative. While theoretically not impossible, at least this is extremely unusual and raises all flags.
Had we not found this, it would have resulted in our stated income to be off by serveral thousand Euro. When (not really an „if“ here) found in a tax audit , that would have been quite a legal affair. We double checked that no other year is affected and had to manually calculate the respective tax form entry to be on the safe side.
Updated Amazon integration creating problems
We are running an Amazon integration, allowing us to sell selected products on Amazon.de (and before Brexit Amazon.co.u).
We do not sell on other EU markets because we can neither provide support nor descriptions in the local languages.
A new version of this integration now replaces the mechanism of how product categories, description and attributes are handles.
Luckily this only requies effort for new products.
The problem is, the first step to sell new products on Amazon is to create a „Product Type“ and these require us to select from a fixed list of product types.
However the non-public category of sex toys is simply not listed to choose from.
So it is impossible for us to add products we have in the shop to our Amazon listing at this time.
They also changed the value we have to enter into the EAN/UPC field for products that don’t have an EAN/UPC/ISBN. Without telling anyone.
So now we have to change the value already entered in hundreds of products.
…and here I though the 5 hour printer jam was the worst that would happen on this lovely Sunday.
Paper jam – an existential crisis
The less glorious parts of running a dildo shop:
Instead of enjoying a sunny Sunday,
we just spend the better part of an evening fixing a paper jam in our (reasonably) big printer.
Down to the point of going through the service manual to take it apart (with some very scary steps).
It may sound benign but having to prepare customs paperwork for Monday and printing invoices and postage for shipping as well as (legally mandatory) product packaging, this is critical.
At this point we know every single photo-interruptor and levered microswitch that has anything to do with paper detection.
Turned out a tiny piece of paper was stuck in a hidden part, used only for duplex printing.
Of cause when we found out, every other part of this hellish contraption was already inspected, cleaned and tested a dozen times over.
Print quality is crap for the time being but good enough for customs paperwork.
In the past, this has solve itself by just having enough unimportant things to print until the last spec of paper dust and microscopic air bubble has left the system.
Improved statistics in preparation for Eurofurence
This was quite a lot of programming work today.
This is one of the many tasks that don’t come to mind when you hear „operating a webshop“.
Last year
We can not bring all toys to Eurofurence. There’s just too many of them.
So we have to choose.
In storage, our toys are organised on boxes of up to 6 different models.
Only models of the same manufacturer end up in a box.
In preparation for Last year’s Dealers Den we wrote 2 new statistics:
- How popular are the products in all boxes of a manufacturer.
- So we can make boxes with only popular and only unpopular toys
- What are the N best boxes in terms of the popularity of their toys
- So we can pack the most popular ones
- Export this list of boxes in a format our custom „price list“ printing program understand
- So the printed catalogues in the Dealers Den queue only contain products we actually have at Eurofurence.
We already made a switch to ignore products that are currently out of stock, so they won’t skew the popularity of a box.
This year
What we still had to do manually is to make sure all products that are new
(where not in the shop at the last Eurofurence) are in boxes we bring to the Dealers Den.
Especially since they may be so new, that there was no chance of them becoming popular yet.
So we added the ability to import this information into the statistics database,
store it, display it as additional details next to products and boxes, took care of all the special cases, debugged everything and finally added a second switch to ignore or use this information when sorting the popularity of products and boxes.
Bad Wolf partially restocked and some mistakes
The small delivery by Bad Wolf (English / German) has arrived.
All but 5 toys and most lubes are in stock again.
Mistakes where made
We made a mistake and ordered a few too many toys for the next delivery (not thinking about this one already being in the pipeline).
We also mistakenly ordered 2 colours of the same size for a new model instead of different sizes.
(Yes, postings in the category „Disturbing Dildo Deliveries“ are basically copy&pasted.
There is just nothing original to write about such a thing but many people are waiting
for toys of a specific manufacturer to come in, so it’s important we post these.)
Updated DHL surcharges
We implemented the updated DHL surcharges for the month of May in the YiffyToys shop.
Note that these are only surcharges that DHL charges on top of the regular shipping prices.
To be completely fair to everyone and charge exactly what DHL charges.
(Because if we don’t, ultimately all customers together pay the difference.)
Energy surcharge
DHL reduces the „energy surcharge“ from 2.50% to 1.25% as the effects of the Russian war in the Ukraine diminishes.
This surcharge is published by DHL monthly.
Crisis fees
DHL lowers the „crisis fee“ for:
- Australia from 3,70€/Kg to 3,50€/Kg,
- Canada from 2,05€/Kg to 1.95€/Kg,
- USA from 2.35€/Kg to 2.15€/Kg
- Chile from 3,9€ to 2,8€,
… It’s a long list.
They also lower the „crisis fees“ for some entire lists of countries like „zone 4“ from 1.5€/Kg to 0.35€/Kg
DHL Sweden+Finnland fuckup
„am 20.04.2023 haben wir Sie über die Berechnung der Haustürzustellungen in Schweden und Finnland seit
Januar 2023 informiert. Dabei ist uns leider ein Fehler unterlaufen.
Die Zusatzkosten für eine Haustürzustellung werden Ihnen entsprechend Ihrer aktuellen Preiskonditionen
bereits ab Januar 2023 für eingelieferte DHL Paket International Premium Sendungen in Rechnung gestellt
und nicht wie fälschlicherweise kommuniziert erst ab dem 01.05.2023.“
DHL wrote that they informed people on the 20th of April about a new fee for Sweden and Finnland effective since January. …spot the mistake.
Amazon and business invoices…again
We just got an email that >5% of our Amazon-Business customes got no automatically uploaded invoice.
That >5% is 1 of 1 business order in a year = 100%.
We actually have automatic upload of invoices seet up.
However the Amazon API only allows to upload an invoice.
Not to check if that upload worked or if an order already has an invoice.
The log also shows that indeed an attempt at an automatic upload was made.
There is also no way with Amazon to only supply end-users and not accept orders from businesses.
We contacted the company that provides the Amazon-integration plugin we use but since this isn’t the first time, there will likely not come anything from this.