Kategorie: Behind the scenes

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.

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.

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.

We irregularly check the list of newly registered customers.
This is done to delete spam-accounts and hacking-attempts created by bots.
Introducing the Captcha helped a lot here but it’s not perfect.
We noticed that the newest account listed for us was quite old.

Investigation

Some investigation found that a daily reindex process was stuck since October and the list of all account shown to us in the backend (and only that list) was not updated because a previous run of that had died but never released it’s database lock.
Luckily only the index of the user-list was affected. All other indices (like all products, all new products, all products with a price change,…) worked just fine.

…work never stops.

result

A short search revealed how we could get this unstuck.
Only the list of all user account for administration and customer support was affected.
Customers could create and use their accounts all this time with no issues.
In the end we found just 48 new accounts obviously created by bots.
(Before introducing the Captcha this number ranked in the tens of thousands.)

We had some trouble with 11 products on Amazon.
We submit products with a very, very detailed „browse node“.
In our case usually
„Health & Personal Care -> Sex & Sensuality -> Sex Toys -> Dildos -> Anal Dildos“
Then Amazon uses that to choose a „product type“.

How it started

The problem was, that for these 11 prducts Amazon has chosen completely inappropriate product types.
Product type: Toy Vehicles
Product type: Animal Cages
Product type: Pet Toys
Product type: Other Shirts
Product type: Plant seeds
Product type: Toy Figures and Playsets

These had the effect that we where asked to enter mandatory information like a „T-shirt size“ for these dildos or they would not be visible.

We contacted the seller support about this.

How it’s going

At first they didn’t understand the issue.

Then they wanted us to tell them what product type to enter. However there is no public list of all product types and Amazon doesn’t display the product type for any correct toys. So we can’t possibly tell them.

Then they claimed „We have determined that the current categorization on the ASIN produces a better customer experience than the requested categorization. As a result, we will not be able to complete your request.„

And finally they claimed „Please note that we were unable to determine the correct categorization on this ASIN as the product data and images are inconsistent.„.
Obviously our very-well-done product photos show dildod and not T-shirts, animal cages or plant seeds.

How it ended

Since there was no way to get these products fixed, we where forced to simply remove them from Amazon’s catalog altogether. We will wait until no trace of them is left in Amazon’s system and try to recreate a single one at a later time.