Selling playing cards on Amazon

As I have said, I am selling playing cards on Amazon (well, A&A are), and it is mainly to get a good handle on Amazon, and how it works.

The recent issue with sending Amazon 2x50 packs of cards, and them logging only 49 received was interesting. It was something like 3 weeks before I could raise an issue, and then 2 weeks to resolve. Even then they (a) recorded 99+0 cards, (b) blamed me for sending to wrong fulfilment centre (I didn't pick it, then did), then finally agreed it was sorted 49+50 cards, and refunded £3.91 for the missing pack. I have no idea where they got the £3.91 figure from!

I do think we are getting a pretty good handle on Amazon now, and I think building up our reputation with them is next step, so cards are good for that as not a lot can go wrong with them (though we have sold one FireBrick FB2900 which is nice). I am happy that the quality of the cards is good, and Ivory Graphics are doing a good job, as I would not want A&A or RevK branded goods not to be the best quality.

So, here are the latest I have listed...



They are here: A&A, FireBrick, Left handed, White. Some will not show until next week as we have only just shipped inventory, but do feel free to add to wish list :-) It would be great if people bought some and left honest feedback.

They are selling for £12 (inc VAT and postage), which seems a lot, so I thought I would break it down so people know what this is all about:

• In the quantities of only 100 these packs cost £5.62+VAT.
• Amazon charge £1.62 fulfilment charge
• There is also around £8.50 charge to send them to Amazon, so lets say 9p a pack for 100.
• There is a storage cost too, but probably only a few pence given the size of a pack of cards.
• Amazon also charge a referral fee (their commission basically) of £1.80
• And of course at £12, there is £2 VAT.

Sell for £12.00 - £2.00 VAT - £1.62 FBA - £1.80 Referral - 10p post/storage - £5.62 cost, leaves 86p profit per pack.

But, there is cost of advertising, without which they seem to literally just sit there and not sell. I was hoping some would sell just because of people searching for cards, but they show up in popularity order, so you have to advertise to get sales to get high in the list, and then maybe you can sell on inertia. 86p a pack is not really enough to cover any sort of advertising, though, so far, twitter seems to be the best for this. So I'll try some twitter advertising once they show in inventory. I'll do another post on that I expect.

It may be that the novelty packs (the minimalist and the left handed) do get some sales based on searches - we'll see. I saw one other minimalist pack sold by loads of people and selling around £20 a pack, so maybe novelty is key here.

All in all, these are going for almost no profit at all, and Amazon make way more than we do out of it.

Of course the economics are better if you buy 1000 at a time. The cost goes down to around £3+VAT then. Even so, you are still selling around £10 to make any sort of profit.

This allows nothing for my time on the designs, or even just the time for Mike at the office packing and sending to Amazon (thanks Mike).

It is a good job we are not trying to sell the cards as something profitable really, isn't it!

Update: As per comments, we have to get cards below £5.31 ex VAT cost price, which just means buying in slightly larger quantity. At that level selling at £8.94 means fees of £2.14 (including only 80p rather than £1.62 FBA fees for small and light). Any lower than £5.31 cost and we can make a profit at £8.94. As for the cards costing £5.62, selling at £10.56 is about cost price, so I have changed to that. Once this batch is sold, I'll get a larger batch and list at £8.94 or lower.

Cal Mah

I have never been to a Comicon or similar. I don't do the whole "dressing up like Captain Kirk" thing, honest (that is more my younger brother).

But I have booked to go to Cal Mah in Leicester 17/18th Nov. (tickets here). It seems to be an unofficial Stargate convention in the UK!

Why? Well, I do like sci-fi, and Stargate, and a few other things, and thought it would be fun. I nearly went off to an event in Vancouver just for fun, but chickened out.

My daughter suggested I went as a Klingon! I mean, no, and no, and WTF? and no, and I would be lynched I expect. Star[things] are not all the same, honest.

I am not wearing a "costume" as such, but I'll take a small step. I remembered that one episode has an "Area 51 ID card" in it. I googled for an image and did not find the one, which was odd. But too much clutter I think. I did find a reference to the episode, SG-1 s8e10 "Endgame", and so watched and found the card :-

No doubt it was deliberately minimalist, but the back was odd...

As it appears to have text about parking! I have tried to reproduce that.

Anyway, suffice to say, I have my "costume" ready...  making use of the A&A card printing service.

Area 51 techie

And maybe I have the Stargate dialling address for Earth on the business cards I am taking, on the end of the address, maybe. That would be sad, wouldn't it?

As I say, never been to a thing like this, but it is a good chance to gauge interest in my Stargate playing cards. Still waiting on UK agent for MGM on that. I'll take the sample pack to show people.

If you want to meet me, get a ticket! I'll be the one badly disguised as an Area 51 techie, with a beard.

Now for extra geek/nerd: Cal Mah is Goa'uld for "Sanctuary" but is also where K'tano, a Goa'uld posing as a Jaffa, gathered rebel Jaffa and was ultimately found out and defeated by Teal'c and then the site was destroy by Goa'uld Lord Yu. So is this conference as scam by a Goa'uld I wonder?

Norfolk Broads

Time for another short cruise. Well, cruise is a bit of an over statement, it was four nights pottering about on the Norfolk Broads. It is the first time I have ever been there. I have been on canal boats as a child in the Midlands, but nothing quite like this - thankfully no locks!

For a start, I had not appreciated how flat and wet Norfolk seems to be - lots of water and marshes, and clearly the first against the wall when sea levels rise. I mean seriously the whole place is going to vanish off the map, it is scary. So just as well I have had the chance to visit. It is quaint :-)

I can see how it is a lovely holiday for some people, and I do not want to put it down at all. Apart from freezing the first night, the weather for early October was actually quite good - dry, clear, sunny. Actually nice and pleasant.

As boats on the Broads go, we had a nice boat from Barnes Brinkcraft, an electric hybrid. We pottered around, went to a pub one night, ate well all week, and drank well! A nice quiet few days with my two best friends.

We even played cards (a 64 card deck with Altreran characters)...

I managed to keep up walking a bit, and even found an old Abbey, turned in to a windmill (literally just built over the original gate/entrance). They have lots of windmills there, mostly to pump water!

So, thank you Simon and Mike for a nice few days.

However, there was one thing that surprised me. A bit of technology...

• I have had this technology for at least a decade
• I have never (until this trip) used it
• It is always on my person, I mean not a second not so, even shower, bath, swimming, sleeping.
• It does not need charging even

What is it?

My watch! It has tides shown on the main screen. I may only be an ape-descended life forms that is so amazingly primitive that I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea, but it was not actually a key feature when buying it. It works, and we needed it as some bridges are too low during high tide. It shows three levels of amplitude and roughly where you are in the tide cycle (6 steps) on the main display. It is solar powered and radio set, nice little watch and I can see how anyone that lived or worked on the water, such as on the Broads, would find it invaluable.

Anyway, we are pondering a trip on a canal next time...

SVG, font metrics, am I being thick?

I really hope someone tells me I have missed the bleeding obvious for a change.

I think SVG lacks two key features.

1. The ability to set a maximin size on a line of text, i.e. so that if it works out longer it will be squashed in some way. There is a way to set a calculated size and have either the spacing or the spacing and glyphs adjusted to match that, but I cannot find a way to say "squash, but only if it would be too big".

2. The ability to take a block of text, give it a width (and height, why not) and line spacing and have it fill the box, breaking on spaces between words.

If there is svg magic (and I don't mean javascript to run on a web site that will do the business later), just plain svg that will easily convert to png or pdf, and still work, that is what I want.

The alternative, for which I am still massively failing to find a solution, is a simple Debian installed C code library (not C++ please) that allows me to ask "how wide is this string in this font". I found qfontmetrics which looks spot on, but is C++. Obviously, including emojis!

With this I can make the tools I current have which produce svg output (to later be converted to PDF or PNG, etc) work out when to set a line width, or break blocks of text, and work with normal svg.

All of this is a doddle in postscript, but unless someone has a patch for gs to handle utf-8 strings natively and handle a fuller character set with the likes of emojis, I need to move away from postscript, hence using svg. Just hitting this key stumbling block for now.

Update: Thanks for all the comments. I am looking at freetype at the moment. It looks like it has exactly what I need, but slightly struggling with Emojis and the like at the moment :-)

Update: Yes, FreeType has simple C functions to load a font/face and find the size of glyphs based on unicode characters, and simple to tell it does not have the character and use a noto/emoji font instead, etc. This should be simple to then work out line wrapping and sizes for SVG with tspan for emojis and the like. Now I know it is all possible and how to do it, I have to think about the project for which I was asking this - a new system for designing printed plastic cards...

Making people aware: Anglian windows

As I blogged (here) I have a new conservatory. Some have asked why we went for Anglian windows, mainly because they are expensive. Well, I'm married and sometimes I do as I am told by my wife, but to be fair, the actual windows looked good (pictures, samples, etc). I cannot really comment on the quality beyond that as I am no expert, and the real proof will be what happens over the next few years, but fingers crossed. I can say, apart from the missing pane of glass, the result does look good, and is a lot nicer than our old one.

I can comment on the salesman. He was annoyingly pushy. The price is hiked and then vague discounts applied to get it to just being really expensive instead of insanely so. He really did not like that I said initially "not now" - it was just before I went on a holiday, and I was not sure if I could afford it yet - they were calling lots even though we specifically said what date to come back. He did not like that I wanted to just pay for it rather than taking their credit. I really hate having debts hanging over me (after various experiences in my life), so as much as possible I try to pay for things or not have them - fortunately I'm in a position where that can work most of the time.

The mildly slick part was the iPad which created a pretty accurate 3D image of the conservatory as it would actually be - colours of everything, right size, everything. Some weeks later a proper survey was done, and we were sent drawings. All good.

I was pretty unhappy with communications from them - they called after 5pm Friday to say they would come on Monday. They could have booked a date weeks in advance, but no, we are just told the day with no notice. That was hassle.

As I said, it ended up with bits missing and delays, but by the end of the week we had most of a conservatory except one pane of glass.

Mistakes happen. I run a company, and I know things can, and do, go wrong. Personally, I take things seriously and always aim to fix things, not just for the mistake but to stop the same mistakes in future.  If anyone has a problem with A&A you are welcome to tell me, please. However, Anglian have a different approach it seems.

Again, very poor communications, and now several times, a few weeks apart each time, they have come out with the wrong pane of glass. How can this happen? Well, mistakes happen I guess! How can it happen two or three times? How can they have no process to expedite making the new pane of glass and not take weeks?

Well, I do try to be reasonable, really. They had chance to fix this - which is only fair - but after a while I ended up giving them an ultimatum - end of Sep or it gets to be a sponsored tweet.

That did nothing to get them to actually fix it, or even try to fix it quickly, which was a surprise. Well, I don't like making threats that I don't follow through...

SO, @AnglianHome @AnglianHelp as you have not fixed the window I have a paid tweet to anyone interested in home improvement, conservatories, double glazing, showing how bad you are. Please remember, you asked me to post on social media when I ordered. pic.twitter.com/erNql3EkOl

— RevK® (@TheRealRevK) 1 October 2018

Now some may think that is somewhat mean, I guess. As I say, I gave them plenty of time to avoid it. But the real irony here is that the salesman gave one of the vague discounts in return for my agreeing to post on social media - so they literally asked for this!

I only paid twitter £100, which is almost used up now, but so far it is around 60,000 views, and 40 new followers as a result. Many people saying they won't now buy from Anglian. One that had a quote from them but is now cancelling that. I am also quite relieved that the comments I am getting are largely "good on you" / "well done", and people impressed that I am putting my own money in to making people aware of this. To be fair, if people were calling me an arse, I would have stopped the promotion, but they are not - this is nice as I do not always gauge how people will react to something like this (yeh, really, sorry).

Of course, there will have to be a next step. I plan to wait for one more wrong pane of glass before we get to the legal notice stage.

What puzzled me is that they really seem not to care. In some ways it is like dealing with large companies like BT that seem to lack the concept of "expedite the fix if we screwed up" even though they have (paid) expedite processes. Why can Anglian not make the right pane of glass in a day? Why can they not make the right pane of glass? It really is amazingly crap customer service.

I hope what I did has been a useful service to people considering double glassing, conservatories, etc.

Update: Windows update complete, 10th October. Initial install 20th August.

Making tax digital

HMRC are expecting VAT to be submitted electronically directly from accounts systems. This seems vaguely sensible. It is mandatory from April 2019. It avoids typing mistakes at the very least.

So, we look on HMRC developer web site and see that they list APIs. They list some using RESTful APIs and some XML ones here. The XML ones include submitting VAT returns. Something we have had for some time, and is all "digital" as required. So we were thinking, cool, we did this years ago, not an issue.

But we actually asked them about it, just in case, and they are very confusing. They say the XML API does not "support" making tax digital - which - err - makes no sense, it is digital. They apparently have an API that is not the XML API for the MTD VAT submission but oddly it is not in that list of APIs, so we have to register with them in some way to get the API.

The web site does not say the existing XML API is going away, indeed they confirm it is not, but apparently will not be valid to use for MTD, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Why are HMRC not accepting their own digital XML APIs that they have in existence for submitting VAT digitally? An API they confirm they are not withdrawing? Why have they apparently produced secret new APIs to submit it? It makes no sense.

Thankfully it will be simple enough to do, one way or another, and there is still plenty of time. The recording of VAT and ensuring it is all digital is all covered, thankfully.

Update: We have finally got access to the documentation on the API, it is hidden behinds a login and not published along side all of the other APIs. There is no reason why the API for this should not be published, and even less reason when you consider the other APIs are published. It also makes little sense for a mandatory API to be in a beta state only 6 months before it has to be in use by every accounting package in the country. Thankfully it is very noddy JSON/OAuth.  I cannot see anything in VAT notice 700/22 that makes the XML API invalid in anyway. The OAuth, of course makes assumptions, i.e. that someone is authorising a third party to access / submit VAT details, which is not the case here. There seems to be no "journey" (as they describe it) for someone that is submitting VAT returns for themselves using their own software. They also have gems like they want to know the public IP address and port of the web browser that requested filing the VAT return - forgetting that it may not have a public IP address even as it may be on a private network! I just hope it copes with that being an IPv6 address.

Update: WTF? They made us jump through hoops before letting us have access to the API documentation for submitting the VAT return - but their own service standards require that everything they do is published, reusable, open source, and they even have a GitHub page!

Update: I am pretty sure I have now found a newbie error in the HMRC OAUTH stuff (mis escaping form data in a sequence of pages) - we'll see what they say. Worked around.

OFCOM and some sanity? Maybe?

We have had, for some time, a term on our order form for all communications service a requirement to agree to:

"(OFCOM GC20.5) You confirm that you, and all end users, have access to a missing child helpline using 116000 - i.e. you all have mobile phones, landlines or payphone you could use to call this number. Sorry, stupid clause I know, blame OFCOM."

The new GCs that come in today are slightly saner and only apply where we are providing services "for originating calls to a number or numbers in the National Telephone Numbering Plan, excluding any Click to Call Service". Finally these requirements for access to the missing child helpline no longer apply to anyone providing any communications service (e.g. broadband or leased lines, etc).

So, at last, the requirement is removed from the terms on our order form. Our telephony services do allow 116000 to be called.

I should add that is this insane in the first place, as the 116000 "missing child helpline" is (a) not for missing children to call, i.e. the people that may need to remember some special short code (116000 is not so short), and (b) simply passes on details to the police, it is not a counselling service or something otherwise more useful than FUCKING CALLING THE POLICE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

This, and some cookie laws, are the few cases I curse the EU stupidity. But at least whilst we are in the EU we can try and fix these.

Also, OFCOM have finally removed some of the requirements to provide directory enquiries and operator assistance. The Internet replaced these a long time ago, but OFCOM still needed them until today.