We have activated Link (by Stripe) as a wallet to pay from and have requested iDEAL for the Netherlands to be activated as a payment method in the shop.
(Not much else to say about that)
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.
Improved credit card payments
We updated the credit card payment module to a new major version.
For customers:
it should be much faster now and
„will issue invoices, receipts, and other customer facing emails to that customer with an appropriately translated email, payment page, or PDF. 15 languages are currently supported.“
For us:
„No more pending orders for card payments and other synchronous payment methods. When a payment fails, there won’t be a Pending/Canceled order in the admin area.“
and
„95% reduction in incomplete payments in the Stripe dashboard. When customers arrive at the checkout page, no payments are created in „Incomplete“ status.“
DHL updates in shop
We updated to a new major version of the DHL integration.
(After fiddling with dependencies for a while.)
For customers, the following changes should be visible:
- On the pickup location finder map in checkout, if available, show description of the building/facility etc. a service point is located within.
- Select „Named Person Only“ service with DHL Paket National shipments.
- Select „No Neighbor Delivery“ service with DHL Paket National shipments.
New search criteria „lifecast“
shop update
We just performed a major update of our shop software including the move to a new major PHP version.
Everything seems to be in order.
However if you notice anything not working as it should, please tell us, so we can have a look and fix it!
Categorize by price
We have changed the selection of toy size categories,
so you can select by price range inside each category right away.
We think this should make it easier for you to find what you are looking for
in our vast selection of toys.
You can still select your own price range to match your budget.
These are just suggestions based on the typical prices of toys in each category.
mobile
Contrary to the old one, the new layout also properly flows in mobile devices and narrow browser windows.
All new photos
It is done!
The last old product photos of the more then 330 toys we have in the YiffyToys shop have been replaced with new ones.
All photos should now show a perfectly white background and no shadows.
All photos are done with the same light setup on the same background.
Mobile friendly home page
We just made the German home page of the shop more mobile friendly.
The English one is not updated yet.
What do you think of it? Please tell us!
Mobile
The category foxes are now displayed below each other on mobile devices instead of rendering the same way as on a desktop.
Formerly the introduction text would take up more then just the first screen,
before the actual categories would be shown.
Desktop (new)
Since everyone is only interested in toys and lube,
the other categories have moved down.
Also the introduction text has been shortened
vs Desktop (old)
This is how it used to look up to this point.
new category „clearance sale“
To better find them,
we have added a new category „clearance sale“ for all the products, that are no longer being manufactured or that we will not restock.
