DHL – Seite 3 – YiffyToys – Behind the scenes

2021-08-162023-01-31

Stuck at the DHL airport?

Looks like we have 2 delivery from FoxyRabbit and Zetacreations,
both not having left the local DHL freight airport in serveral days.
Hopefully both will arrive in customs (and the customs notification get here) before WE leave for the first multi-day, in-person furmeet of the year.

Speaking of furmeets, we are currently preparing our booth for the After-Dark section of the Eurofurence Online II dealers den.
Being made slightly complicated by the VR dealers den not allowing any kind of adult content to be visible in the graphics.

2020-12-302024-01-31

New 2021 DHL Prices

We have added the new 2021 DHL prices.
Like every year, all DHL prices have become ever so slightly more expensive.
As the (temporarily reduced) German VAT rate goes back up to 19%, so do all the EU shipping fees. non-EU exports obviously don’t include VAT.

Brexit

While GB has always been a „premium delivery only“ country,
sadly it now also includes +4.49€ just for GB.
But at least the +19% German VAT are gone now.
They are however replaced by 20% UK VAT payed at delivery and we are required to incur a minimum order size of 135£ to comply with HMRC changes in VAT rules independent of BREXIT.
That is, as soon as DHL accepts parcels for the UK and Ireland again.

Germany

For Germany the +0.10€ for Maut get an additional +0.01€ for the new CO2 tax.

2020-10-062023-01-31

DHL update

We did a major update of the DHL shipping module in our shop software.
You can now select a DHL parcel station on a nice map
and we are prepared for the next major version of the shop software in a few month.
(We are waiting for a compatible version of a special, German plugin needed to display base prices per 1L/1Kg for bottles of lubricants. A feature required by law.)

Now we will have to wait for the first customer to create orders with the new module, to verify that (bulk) printing and our own extensions are still working as designed. We know that it still does work with orders that already exist.

2020-09-082023-01-31

DHL – changes in USA shipping

Due to the SARS-SoV2 most international flights are cancelled.
Up to now this ment long waiting times for a plane to carry parcels along and a small surcharge to all parcels headed for the US.

Starting 15th of September that surcharge will be lifted (and we will reduce our prices accordingly) but a lot of parcels will travel by sea. So the waiting time for a flight will be replaced by the travel time of a cargo ship slow steaming across the Atlantic.
DHL says this means 25-30 days of travel time for parcels.

Premium parcels are still flown (and still have the surcharge in addition to the already high price tag) but due to the weight of our products, we do not offer that service.

2020-08-132023-01-31

DHL shipping to NL fixed

A while ago we automated our shipping fee calculation due to all of DHLs Corona-fees for different countries. It seems while doing so we have forgotten the Netherlands in the big table of country codes.
So for NL (but not the Netherland Antilles) only „pickup at converntion“ would show up and no „DHL shipping“.

This has been brought to our attention this morning and we have just been able to fix it.

We are also asking DHL for clarification on what Corona-fees for different countries are still in effect as there have been a large number of changes we have to incorportate for different countries and DHL’s updates are purely incremental.

2019-12-192023-01-31

No new DHL prices

DHL in Germany currently is in the news because DHL will increase prices for end customers starting on the 1st of January.

However, for business customers that already happend at the 1st of September this year.
So we will not increase our shipping prices with the new year.

2019-06-292023-01-31

DHL issues

We updated our shop software in the (misguided) hope that an email bugfix contained in the update would fix our contact form.
(It didn’t.)

Right after the update we got strange „host unrechable“ errors when trying to automatically purchase DHL postage. It does happen that their servers are out of order. Especially in the middle of the night or on weekende.
So we just waited and yes, the next day this error was gone.

But now we are getting errors downloading the WSDL file for the DHL SOAP service. The problem is… in a web browser and on the command line we can download that WSDL file just fine. We also did not change any PHP settings. Especially regarding network permissions.
All debug logging, poking around and testing stuff didn’t give us any clues whatsoever.

So for the time being are are required to copy&paste every single delivery address to the manual DHL business customer website and purchase each label separately. Then enter the tracking details in the shop and print everything. All automation that enables us to handle the daily workload is gone.

2019-01-042023-01-31