First of all, we would like to apologize for the down time. Originally we had planned to have down time of max 3 to 4 days. However, Murphy's Law just freaking sucks! Things that were fixed on our development end did not react the same once it's on the live server.

Long story short, we took extra 3 days and our developers working over the weekend to get this done. Although the extra days weren't all BAD. With the extra down time, our warehouse staff made good use of all the down time to clean up and reorganize so that we should be even more efficient for shipping and receiving.

Back to your original topic posting~

ToyDemon was established back in January of 2008, and now we are 15 years in and ready to launch the 6th iteration of the ToyDemon website or TD6 as we call it internally.

Before we introduce the new site and its features, we want to take a little time to show you how far along we have come.

We are not sure if any of you are still with us since we started in 2008. Heck, it even took us a while to remember and hunt down what TD 1 looked like back in 2008 in our archives.

So check out below all the different iterations of ToyDemon since inception:

TD1: 2008 - 2009

This was our first website. At the time, we only carried TENGA products and within a year we had to update to TD2 because it was too limiting as we started carrying onaholes and other japanese sex toys. If someone is interested about hearing how / what made us started ToyDemon, let us know and we'll talk about it in another post.

TD2: 2009 - 2011

You can see here that there was still a focus on TENGA and other brands (who still remembers Kashin!?!?), but most of the front page is banner based. At that time, a lot of the picture and banner changes were manual. As one of the very few japanese sex toy shops in the US, so we also quickly outgrew TD2.

Forum was introduced in 2009 and Blog was introduced during the TD2 era.

TD3: 2011 - 2013

We updated to a more modern design for a broader audience as we carried female and couples products. Again, as the product catalog grew, we also had to keep up with our website feature and design along with it.

TD4: 2013 - 2018

One of the biggest jumps we had to make. We had a sizeable customer base by then and our product catalog was even bigger. We had to switch to a completely new cart system. With the change, we also were able to add a lot more features.

We also had a TD4.5 around 2017-2018 with a slight home page refresh as we introduced our sister site ToyAngel at the time. But that never worked out in the end.

TD5: 2018 - 2023

Our previous site. TD5 stayed on the same cart system as TD4 but upgraded to the latest version at the time to take advantage that the latest version brings. We added many features to TD5 as we progressed along but felt it was time to prepare TD6 in late 2020.

TD6: 2023 - 202X

The concept of TD6 started in late 2020, and the project started in April of 2021. And now we are finally making the switch. You will notice that TD6 looks a lot like TD5, and you'd be correct. We had to keep the same cart system as we simply have too many features and customers to move to a different system.

We changed the appearance slightly so it feels fresh while maintaining a familiar feel so that all the users will feel right at home on TD6. Our focus was adding more features and optimizing the speed and experience of ToyDemon.

We also made a lot of quality of life changes to the overall site experience which we hope will make browsing the site easier and more smoothly. Since there are a lot of updates and functions, we are going to go through the bigger changes below so that you will be able to make use of the new features.

1 - Dark Mode!

This has been requested for a long time and it's finally here! By clicking on the light bulb icon, you can switch to and back from dark mode. This will make browsing the site that much easier late at night on your phone. Dark mode might seem simple enough, but a lot of time went into making sure all the dark mode displays correctly and matches the dark theme.

**For reference, all the explanations and screenshots below will be captured from Dark Mode.**

2 - Avatars

The onahole community is a niche yet close community. Having this community is important not just to our customers, but to ToyDemon as well. Your reviews, questions, critiques, and compliments are what makes ToyDemon different from other onahole shops. So we focus a bit more on the community aspect of our site.

We added an avatar system so that each user can customize what they'd want to look like. It makes differentiating users easier and the more helpful users will be easily recognized.

The background of the avatar will display the member level of the person. If they're bronze, the background color will display bronze color. The avatar system is also tied into many different things such as Review, Wish List, and Community so it stays consistent through out the site.

We know privacy is very important to everyone, so the avatar is not mandatory and can be removed anytime within your account dashboard.

3 - Product Discussion Tab

Users can now ask and discuss product specific questions directly on the product itself. It follows the community format and features, so one will be familiar at how it works.

With this product discussion added, we removed the previous "Product Questions".

4 - Private & Public Wish Lists

Private wish lists work the same as a normal wish list from before. You can manage and add to it however you see fit.

Public wish lists is where the main difference comes in. The public wish lists are public for everyone to see under a product's Wish List tab and within your community profile.

Previously, users asked us to add a tag system, and the public wish list helps bridge the gap to a tag system. So one can create a public wish list and name it "Best Oral Toys" and everyone can click into the "Best Oral Toys" public wish list to see what that specific user feels are the "Best Oral Toys":

This way, if you feel user ABC's reviews and taste matches you best, you can check out if they have a public wish list that could suggest other products that might work for you.

Again, you can always switch the list to private to hide it from everyone.

5 - New Product Voting System

One issue with the previous product poll in the community was that you can only select 1 onahole that interests you, even when you are interested in multiple onaholes.

"Por que no los dos?" This new system replaces the original product poll system within the community. Instead of voting on 1 product, you can "Like" as many products that interest you. This will also help us broaden our product selection and give many new products a chance.

Once a product hits a certain threshold of "Likes", it will become available for "Pre-Order" and allow users to pre-order and take advantage of the pre-order perks.

6 - Stock Notification Management

Previously, you can only sign up for notifications when products come back in stock, but you have no control over it. So many users asked us if there's a way to manage the notifications. Now you can check when they were last sent and manage them within your account dashboard.

7 - New Review Notifications

So you see a new onahole that interests you, but there's no reviews yet. Should you take a chance or wait for others to review? This feature is particularly useful on newer products that don't have many reviews.

By clicking on the icon, you will be notified by email when that specific product receives any new reviews. You'll be able to manage and remove products within your account dashboard here:

8 - Recent Reviews

We created a widget so that it'll display some of the recent reviews posted. That way, instead of always looking to see if there are new reviews to products, you'll be able to see if the recent reviews have products that are of interest to you or if they matched your experience.

9 - Review Text Search

We know when there are a lot of reviews, it's hard to read through every single one. So we added the ability to search within the review text of all the reviews in a product.

This way you can single out specific keywords that matter to you, and just look over those reviews that mention that specific text.

10 - Update Past Reviews

Many people asked about updating their past reviews after using something for a longer period of time and now we have finally added that ability.

By going to your Account Dashboard -> Product Reviews, you can choose your old product review and "Update". A pop up will appear for you to update your review. The star rating you give will replace the previous star rating, and the additional text you put down will be added to the original review with an added date to let others know when the review was updated.

Also with these review updates, we have changed to allowing only verified purchasers to write reviews and limited them to only 1 review per product since they can just update their original review. All approved reviews will now receive 100 Bonus Points instead of 50 for each approved review.

11 - Filterable Tunnel Legnth

This was also a highly requested feature. Previously you were only able to check out an onaholes' tunnel length by going into its details information tab. Now, you'll be able to just filter the length to find the tunnel length that suits you.

12 - Overall Performance

We made it a priority to make sure that even with all the additional features and add-ons, the website will still perform efficiently. In our tests, the site is able to load much faster and more efficiently. However, that was in a closed test and we still have not experienced real traffic.

So please bear with us for the next few weeks as we deal with real traffic and optimization.

*Update* 13 - Search Tips

The search is also slightly different from before. If you just enter words, it'll search within products, blog, and the community.

If you want search for exact phrase. You need to put it with in quotes and " " and it'll search for the exact phrase in the products.

*Update* 14 - More Product Notifications

We have heard from feedback that it's always hard to keep track of what's new and since there's no schedule which we go by when we post new products, they'd like to be notified.

We have added the following product notifications:

-Products added to Pre-Order
-Products added to New Arrival
-Products added to Flash Sale
-Products added to Clearance

This way, the user doesn't have to always check back on the site and is still able to know about the latest on TD. You can access the page in your Account Dashboard ->Email Subscriptions and add the notification to each category that you'd like.

*Update* 15 - Purchased Items Section

The new "Purchased Items" section in your account now lists all the items you have purchased, when you last purchased it, and whether you have reviewed it or not. It's also conveniently linked so that you can go directly to the product itself.

Hopefully that solves a few issues for users that like to keep track of the items they have purchased.

What's Next?

As the site gets bigger and more complex, it also goes without saying that we'll have bugs as well. We tried our best to test and make sure everything works well, but if you run into any issues or bugs, feel free to contact us or leave a comment below and we'll do our best to fix the issues.

There are still more features planned that's on the to-do list and we'll update them as they are available, so stay tuned!