Kategorie: Harder Better Faster Stronger

In preparation to an upgrade to the latest version of our shop system,

we have changed to a much more capable search engine.
You may notice that it’s slightly faster, displays recommed other search words and shows the number of search results for each such suggestion.
We will have to tweak this in the following month to make sure it ignores certain stop words and add additional meta tags to many products, so they are easier to find.

Advanced searh

Did you know that in
https://yiffy.toys/shop2/catalogsearch/advanced/
you can already search toys by species, size ranges, colours and firmnesses?

Our product catalog has grown quite a lot and the categories we have chosen in the past have not quite kept up with the wide variety of offered toys.

Changes

So we’re currently in the process of updating out category system.

As a first step we have included sections for „paws and tentacles“.

There is also a new section „species adapters“, that has been removed from the „masturbators“ section to clafiry the distinction between penis sleves and muzzles.

We have also created a new section „Dragons“ and thus renamed „fantasy“ to „other fantasy“.

Future

We are working on redesigning the landing pages „deep down“ and „by species/type“
We’re also considering moving everything that is not a species out of the „by species/type“ section to make it more consistent.

Cheaper shipping to USA during the Covid-19 crisis

Effective today DHL has reduced it’s penalty for shipments to the USA.
Not only did we take the opportunity to reflect this in our lowered USA shipping fees but we also automated the update process of shipping fees in the shop.

Improvements

Prices for parcels to locations outside Germany are now calculated more precisely on a per-Kilogramm basis instead of just 5 weight classes.

Obviously the automation makes it much easiser to remove the covid-19 related DHL fees when international flight resumes and there are enough passenger planed to take some mail along for the ride.

We no longer have to search for each of the 194 supported countries to update their prices individually. Since DHL increases their prices more or less yearly, this is a regular task and it is important that we don’t forget some remote island state.
(Not that 3 very, very exotic DHL destinations are not supported simple because DHL knows about them but the shop system doesn’t.)

Every now and then we get reports that our emails are delivered to a user’s
spam folder. We do have an SPF record stating what servers are allowed
to send email from @YiffyToys.de -addresses but for many large email
providers that is not enough. Particularly Google and Microsoft are increasingly
picky. Being an adult oriented business doesn’t seem to help as many filters
see that alone as a negative criteria.
Last time we checked this was not possible with our MTA (email server).
But now there is a new filter plugin and we have been able to finally add
DKIM signatures to our emails.
This SHOULD improve the situation from now on. The signatures clearly
verify that our emails are from us and nobody else but us.

Sadly there is not terribly much more we can do to help here.

In addition to
cash payment during events,
EC/V-Pay/Girocard payments during events,
bank transactions (lowest fees of them all),
credit cards and
Paypal…
we are now also offering Amazon Pay as an additional payment method.

Everything should run smoothly.
However we will still keep a close eye on the first orders. If you encounter anything unusual, please tell us, so we can fix it at once.

A lot of custiom and highly specialized PHP coding happened last night and this morning.

Improved Emails

We have fixed a mistake in certain automatic emails, where the adresses would not be shown. Sadly we don’t ever get to see the emails our shop sends out (they don’t end up in our „sent“ folder or something), so this was not noticed earlier.

More importantly, the shipping emails now include the tracking numbers and they are even clickable. (A custom functionality the shop software doesn’t offer by default despite having tracking links in the administrative user interface.)

Improved Postage Labels

Also due to a bug some postage labels would include the name of the shop.
This has been fixed right away after it has come to our attention.

Improved Administrative tools

We also changed some parts of the administrative user interface so allow status updates on an entire group of orders (e.g. orders that have been shipped or that have been printed for shipping) instead of opening each of these orders individually.

That doesn’t sound like much but it does save considerable time and removes repetitive tasks.

The current version of the credit card checkout page experienced technical difficulties and we shut it down last week.
SEPA bank transfers and Paypal of cause are unaffected and work perfectly fine.

Our regular credit card processor is still very slow to provide us with the needed account data to set up their new generation of checkout pages. This migration would be needed anyway to support the mandatory „3D secure II“ later this year. However they didn’t plan for customers to asl for the migration before the start of May.

In the mean time we have set up with another provider to keep accepting credit cards until this is over. We already received the first orders with it. No issues so far. Selling dildos is perfectly fine by the very letter of their T&S but it may stil show that they interprete their own terms rather loosely and we’ll have to give up this temporary workaround. As long as they do the payouts, we’re fine.

We are also investigating Amazon Pay. However we need to clarify in writing if they allow us. „product similar to erotic services“ (erotics being depictions of humans and services being different from products) are not allowed and we need to know in writing if this does or does not mean sex toys.