Kategorie: Harder Better Faster Stronger

Blog postings about improvements we made.

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Alto size fixed and price adjustments

A customer notifed us that the given size of the Twin Tails „Alto“ was that if the „mini“ and not of the „Small“ variant.
We have taken new meassurements and fixed this.

Twin Tails prices

While checking this, we noticed that Twin Tails had raised some and lowered other prices.
We have chosen a very optimistic exchange rate as we adjusted our prices to match.

Improved descriptions

We also improved some old-style descriptions.
For example, the Mocha and the Atlas now links the two size variants
(Also for the different versions of the Sidewinder „Arashiin“).
Also it seems that the Small Hidora was missing an english translation,
Atlas medium was showing a default photo of an Atlas small in English (it was correct in German).
And while at it, we consolidated the wording for „ejaculating“ in German and English product names.

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Layout improvements

We have made a number of improvements to the layout of the home page.

  • The Brexit text is now more concise and uses up less space.
  • The footer is not horizontal and does not cause excessive scrolling
  • advanced search (often not found) is now prominently in the center
  • We added a widget to display products that are currently reduced in price (if any)
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Size category descriptions

Looks like we never got around to translate the decriptions of the size categories.
(So you all know what „tiny“, „mini“, „small“, „regular“, „large“ and „extra large“ mean for us.
We also updated them fron plain HTML text to the new design editor and made them bold, so they stand out more.

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Experimenting with Mastodon (updated)

We are experimenting with integrating the ActivityPub protocoll (e.g. Mastodon) into the YiffyToys blog.
The integration is even tighter then what we did with Twitter.

You should be able to follow @YiffyToys@rect.al in the Fediverse.
The list of people who are following us is private and not shown to anyone else.

Status

We moved to a new instance and things are working now.

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DKIM and DMARC

All emails from the YiffyToys.de -shop (and the english Yiffy.Toys shop of cause)
should now be cryptographically DKIM signed.
This is, so that no spammers can use our domains for faked sender addresses.
We also have a DMARC policy, so all email still arrived but we get a report about how everything is working from the receiving email sercers.
Once this has shown no problems for a while, we will change the policy to first quarantine and later reject all unsigned emails with our shop as a (fake) sender address.

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New server

We are currently in the process of setting up a new and bigger server for our shop.
This Blog has already been moved to the new server and we are making preparations to move the actual shop within the next few days.

Update

On Sunday (the morning after) we noticed a misconfiguration that broke the unencrypted website.
It was not noticed right away because modern browsers would alway try the TLS encrypted website first but easily fixed.
We also forgot a Reverse-DNS entry causing GMX to refuse a single email but this was easily fixed.

Update 2

On Sunday evening we identified and fixed an issue causing a „We can’t add this item to your shoppingn cart“ for some (but not all) products.

  • Customer website works
  • Shopkeeper website works
  • Email works
  • Ordering seems to work.
  • Credit card payments seem to work.
  • Automatic DHL label creation seems to be broken but we can’t find out why just yet. We can however do that manually to continue operating. DHL issue fixed too.
  • Waiting to see if any live Paypal orders are coming in
  • While at it, we also performed a larger software update of the shop software
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1% Paypal fee

Starting this month, Paypal charges significantly higher fees.
They have become significantly more expensive then processing credit cards (and of cause way more then SEPA payments).


We do struggle in this combination of inflation, shortages and exchange rates in freefall, just like everyone else. So we where forced (and luckily PSD II allows us to) charge a 1% fee for Paypal payments. This makes up for a fraction of what they charge to process each payment and retains balance with the already expensive credit card payments.

The fee is made clear in the very name when choosing the payment method and is clearly shown as a separate item in the overview.

FYI: The cheapest online payment method will always be the SEPA bank transfer as it’s only a few cent per transaction in banking fees but no payment processor takes a cut.

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Math baby!

Obviously we can’t bring ALL THE TOYS to the Eurofurence dealers den.
So we already have a statistic that tells us what boxes of toys sell best, to make a selection based on how many boxes we can fit into our booth.

What we are currently doing is another statistic: What pairs of toys should swap boxes.
So that we don’t leave any well-selling toy behind just because a box of great products also contains one that is just collecting dust.

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More details in invoice

We changed the VAT settings to display more details in our invoices and during checkout.
This should not change any prices displayed in the shop and it should only have an effect for customers in EU countries other then Germany.

What you may notice is that:

  • out of stock products are displayed again
  • the link to shipping cost next to the product price is fixed
  • a glitch with prices in 100ml not getting a 1l price displayed for a short time is fixed
  • you can now get notified when an out-of-stock product get in stock again
  • the accidentally enabled review-product feature is disabled again. (it caused massive spam issues in the past and we rather spend our time restocking the shop and counting inventroy then deleting spam)