Kategorie: Behind the scenes

Veröffentlicht am

Happy New Year – changes

Hello everyone,
we have returned from the holidays.
All waiting orders have been shipped. Including what people ordered during New Year.

Bad Wolf

A fresh delivery from Bad Wolf was already waiting for us.
Especially Wolf Cum Lube is back in stock

Horny Ram

With the new year, Horny Ram has updated it’s prices and we had to changed ours accordingly. Some toys did get cheaper but most had their prices raised slightly.

DHL prices lowered

DHL lowered a number of country-specific surcharged and the November+December „peak surcharge“ ends. The energy-surcharge stays stable at 1.25% but with the raised, national price for CO2 emissions we expect the CO2+Maut surcharges to rise at some point this quarter..

Veröffentlicht am

Some issues taking new product photos

We’re currently making photos of a new toy.
Strangely the Raspberry Pi we use to automate much of the repetitive process is extremely slow after applying the latest Raspbian updates.

Not sure what is happening.
It seems to be using swap space on the slow SD card for some reason.

Veröffentlicht am

Recycling our packaging gets slightly more expensive

We are paying to have the product-packaging and transport packaging we send out and the ones we receive properly recycled.
As everything gets more expensive, these prices(for Germany) are going up in 2024 as well.

Luckily it’s not too much to handle yet.
After all, these prices are for each Tonne of material and we calculate in the realm of just a few Kilogramms per year.

Veröffentlicht am

security update

The YiffyToys shop will be down for a few minutes to install a minor security update.
It worked find on the test-system, so we don’t expect any hickups.

Veröffentlicht am

Bank ends cash handling service

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.

Veröffentlicht am

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.

Veröffentlicht am

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.

Veröffentlicht am

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.

Veröffentlicht am

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.