Hinter den Türen des YiffyToys Shops.
Blog postings about improvements we made.
Multiple customers have reported issues with credit cards and our payment provider wants everyone to migrate to a new system anyway due to „3D Secure 2“ being rolled out.
Until the credit card provider can solve the issues, we have temporarily disabled credit card payments. Paypal still works fine.
Sorry.
It’s a rainy day and we had too much coffee….
So we updated several hundred products with new „species“ attributes, searchable and comparable values for „length“ and „usable length“. The new comparable „maximum diameter“ attribute. Images that got broken or gone missing. More categories allow dynmic filtering, …
A ton of boring cleanup work, so you can make the most out of the advanced search, the ability to dynamically filter the product lists in large categories and to select products to compare them side by side.
We also defined objective rules for our 5 size categories.
Based on usable length with exceptions for unusual and extreme knots.
Tiny = usable length 13cm or less and no excessive knots
Mini = usable length 17cm or less and no unusualy thickness
Regular = usable length 26cm or less and <8cm thickness
Large = usable length 40cm or less and <9cm thickness
Extra Large = everything larger
We do not apply the same rules within the „Canines“ and „Equines“ category. Simply because horses are usually quite large already and it would lead to very biased subcategories of Horses and of Canines
Within the canines, the medium sizes is everything from 16-20cm of usable length.
Within the equines, the medium sizes is everything from 20-29cm of usable length.
Sadly the software does not allow selecting ranges of numerical values when searching for size values or when using the dynamic filters. That feature is only supported for the attribute type „price“. Sorry. We’re keeping our eyes open for a plugin that adds this missing feature.
With the new store categories, we have started to add a new product attribute for drilldown and searching.
You can now select from a fixed list of species. Given that allowing multiple species for a single item and that synonyms are not possible, this is only a very broad categorisation.
The intent is to use it in categories like „dildos by size“ and „dildos by manufacturer“ to further restrict the visible toys but also to easily find e.g. deer in the category of „roughly equine species of medium size“
At this point only few toys have this attribute already set but we are adding it to more toys one at a time. This is a very time consuming process and daily shop operation, stock management as well as new toys and manufacturers have a higher priority. So it will take some time until all toys have their species assigned to them.
We are currently switching bank accounts.
New orders paying by SEPA bank transfer will already retrieve the new account details for their payment.
The old account will still remain valid for a few weeks.
This should be plenty of time for the very few bank transfer -orders in the shop that have not payed yet. (*)
While being quite an ordeal for a privat bank account, such a switch is a bit more involved when it’s about a company account. Over the past few weeks we have set in motion most of the paperwork involved (including customs- and tax offices) and so far the transition seems to run smoothly.
The advantage for you: SEPA bank transfer payments arrive within a day instead of 2-3 days now. (With Commerzbank, they didn’t become visible in online banking until some time later. Thus we could not ship as quickly as would be otherwise possible.)
The advantage for us: In the end we’ll even pay much less fees. Up to now our Aval for a simplified customs process was quite expensive and every customer paying by SEPA bank transfer would cost us about 0,15€ in addition to a monthly fee. While not free (Company bank accounts that include cash handling and a Maestro card are not) this is now much cheaper and the SEPA payment fees are gone up to a very comfortable monthly limit.
Based on how they handle very long time customers (we’re talking decades here).
Not just one or two or a dozen or 3 dozen customers.
We’re talking thousands. Whole families, businesses, entire diplomatic embassies.
People in good and very good standing. People being granted the elevated „First“ status by this bank. Not only free accounts that never run up any overdraft or loan interest and thus don’t make their bank much money. Even business customers who pay considerable banking fees every month, heavy hidden fees in exchange rates and quite hefty fees for business services such as an Aval or business SEPA debit mandates.
We can not recommend anyone to choose this bank and to leave there while you still can. In case you are with them, here are some sources you should seriously consider:
NDR „Der Mark“
NDR „Panorama“
FAZ
Der Westen (Funke Media Group)
Osttüringer Zeitung
DW Akademie
Hamburger Morgenpost
Comdirect User Forum (1) (2)
Trustpilot
There is a reason they need to advertise a staggering 100eur for new customers there (any seemingly very often not paying that). Think about it!
This is separate from their terrible standing with being thrown out of the DAX index .
As as result 7300 employees where let loose. 4210 of them in corporate banking. In the medium sized business support this ment 50% of staff in southern Germany and 40% in northern Germany. (Handelsblatt late 2017)
This ment unreachable/bad and constantly changing business customer service representatives (1) including ours. We’re not going into details about our own experiences there due to internal details. TL:DR: All business service stopped after late 2018 and it seems all good customer service staff have left on their own for better banks even before the layoffs.
FAZ
Der Westen (Funke Media Group)
Osttüringer Zeitung
DW Akademie
Hamburger Morgenpost
Comdirect User Forum (1) (2)
Trustpilot
There is a reason they need to advertise a staggering 100eur for new customers there (any seemingly very often not paying that). Think about it!
This is separate from their terrible standing with being thrown out of the DAX index .
As as result 7300 employees where let loose. 4210 of them in corporate banking. In the medium sized business support this ment 50% of staff in southern Germany and 40% in northern Germany. (Handelsblatt late 2017)
This ment unreachable/bad and constantly changing business customer service representatives (1) including ours. We’re not going into details about our own experiences there due to internal details. TL:DR: All business service stopped after late 2018 and it seems all good customer service staff have left on their own for better banks even before the layoffs.
*) Given that orders with payment by SEPA bank transfer that still haven’t payed a week after get a gentle reminder with the bank details and after multiple weeks and reminders must get canceled anyway so as not to block toy-inventory that other people would like to buy.)
This may sound boring but for us this is a big deal.
We can now make better predictions for toys that have already run out of stock and get a better recommendation on how many to order. They take the current, medium term and long term situation situation into consideration.
We constantly keep toys by 13 manufacturers in stock and with custom, discontinued and upcoming toys we have reached nearly 900 different toys and variations in the system.
If you are able to order a toy in the YiffyToys shop, this means we actually have it right here in the small warehouse to ship it right away. That means we had to order it some time between 2 weeks and 4 month ahead of time.
So with the money we have at hand, we need to have a good prediction of what toys will be ordered. Else we would waste our limited space (and considerable funds) on overstocked toys instead of a broader selection for you to choose from.
While entering the new DHL prices for 2019,
we made a mistake for Austria, France and some other countries.
Shipping there should not cost just as much as the rest of Europe.
Sorry.
How to you package horse cock in style and safe the planet at the same time?
This is how:
For a short time wee are experimenting with wood shavings as packaging material. It’s actually a great material to package the very last of our mugs. (Yes, we don’t ONLY have dildos in the shop.)
A few products where accidentally marked as „not in stock“.
The shop software mandates that the flag „in stock“ must be set independently from the count of how many are in stock, thus creating the possibility for human error.
We found this due to some new consistency-checks introduced into our in-house statistics.
The respective products „Hank (small)“, „Duke II“, „Eager Fox“, „Goliath“ and „Equine“ have been fixed.
We are experiencing some technical difficulties related to the recent upgrade to a new shop software.
Credit cards payment is currently offline. We hope to enable it again tomorrow. It simply didn’t work because because of a wrong license key.
Saved addresses of customers from Switzerland did not work because the Kanton is now a required field. We have manually added the correct Kanton to all their addresses.
One email tamplate had a glitch in the customer name. This is fixed.
We accidentally overwrote the Exotic Erotics Subwoofer. It has been restored but we need to add the meassurements again.
As posted last weekend, we are planning to upgrade to a faster server.
The new server has now been ordered and it will take serveral days to set it up.
We will announce the planned date of the downtime to switch to the new hardware in time.