Jun 7 Update: Bulk Coupon Creation, Squashed a few Bugs

  • Jason@DPD
  • June 7, 2013
  • 7 Comments

Today’s update brings a often requested feature enhancement and fixes a couple minor bugs uncovered by vendors.

Bulk Coupon Creation

Previously we’ve had vendors who wanted us to create many single use coupons to give away as promotional items, in exchange for payment in offline settings like conferences, etc. We’ve always been happy to create these manually, but it was a time consuming process that required a developer to manually insert them in to the database, making the vendor wait.

Well, no longer. Vendors can now create multiple coupon codes with the same settings by inserting multiple codes, one per line, in the coupon creation form.

Once you submit your multiple codes, we’ll show you a confirm page for you to double check and make sure that everything looks ok before they’re actually created.

Bulk coupon codes are useful for a number of different scenarios- Offline sales at conferences or in person, promotional giveaways, email and physical mail promotions, etc.

Tip: If you need random codes generated for your coupons try Random Code Generator

Other Changes and Bug Fixes in this Update:

  • Added coupon to Sales Notification
  • Added merge vars for subscription information on invoice
  • Sped up best seller query on dashboard to address load speed issues
  • Fixed text display showing raw HTML on affiliate TOS
  • Fixed Short description label for combo create (used to just say “Description” which was inconsistent with product creation)

May 28 Update – Tons of Little Things

  • Jason@DPD
  • May 28, 2013
  • No Comments

Today we released an update that has many user-requested tweaks and fixes. Some of the items listed below were patched out between full updates and are included here for reference.

Product Site Improvements:

  • Added purchase ID to affiliate emails
  • Added MXN currency
  • Fixed a bug with theme previews and theme colors
  • Addressed a bug with sale limits on the cart
  • Fixed a small bug with form errors on the newsletter page
  • Updated German translations
  • Changed Sagepay test mode from “Simulator” to “Test”
  • Clarified “issue number” error on sagepay Maestro checkout
  • Allow configuring submit order button label on theme.
  • Enable twig processing on theme parameters
  • Fixed a bug with shipping zones not appearing in alpha order.
  • Updated invoice themes to include custom fields
  • Fixed a rare bug when creating bundles
  • CHF currency displays as CHF instead of SwF
  • Fixed a bug that affected some multi-product chooser deployments
  • Fixed a typo on shipping option selection in the cart
  • Added invoice merge vars to email templates
  • Made the affilite program TOS rich text
  • better error messages on user/programsignup
  • display last update time for stats on dashboard.
  • Require captcha for trial vendors sending free downloads (to prevent automated spamming).
  • Newsletter Queue Improvements and better send time estimation

We’re currently working on several large projects for DPD including fulfillment based product delivery that will include multiple files / keys / text per product, and more.

Keycode Products Now Require Approval

  • Jason@DPD
  • February 12, 2013
  • 5 Comments

Keycode products are products that deliver a product activation keycode or URL by themselves or with a download.

Currently, 4% of products in DPD are keycodes. Of that 4%, we’ve found that a large percentage of those are used for illegal purposes, being it selling stolen software or game activation keys, links to download stolen software not hosted by our service, and more.

This is against the DPD Acceptable Use Policy and we can not, as a responsible company, tolerate distribution of stolen or illegal keys with our service.

For this reason, all new trial and paid accounts now have keycode products disabled by default. In addition, we are cracking down and doing an account-by-account search for illegal activity and closing those accounts without warning, as outlined in our Acceptable Use Policy.

We understand that there are legitimate uses for keycode products- thats why we designed the feature! It is not our intention to penalize vendors who have legitimate uses for keycode products, and vendors who are currently selling legal keycodes are not affected by this change.

[box]If you would like to sell keycodes for software that you developed, or other legitimate, legal uses please contact us with your site address, legal business name and contact info, and the software you’ll be selling and we’ll manually review and approve you to create keycode products.[/box]

Update: Product Delivery Message and More

  • Jacob@DPD
  • January 29, 2013
  • 3 Comments

In This Release

Product Delivery Message

We have added the product delivery message feature from service products to all products. You can add a message when creating or editing any product. This feature is great for giving your customers a link to a support forum, a phone number, or simply a message telling them “thank you.”

In addition we have given an option to expire the delivery message when the download limit has been reached.

Require Retyping Email on Checkout

You can now require that your customers enter their email twice for free and paid checkouts. This can cut down on deliveries to invalid email addresses. If you would like to enable this feature, click on Preferences in the left menu and enable the Require Email Retype on Checkout

Auto-return for Add to Cart Links

If you would like to bring your customers back to your site immediately after adding the product to the cart, check the Auto-return to continue shopping URL option in the button creator. For your existing links simply add in the &return=1 parameter to your links. A continue shopping URL is required to enable auto-return.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

  • Fixed custom product price names not showing on the product chooser
  • Fixed 2co delivery page redirect for Internet Explorer users
  • Added guards to prevent double submitting the customerinfo form for free checkouts
  • Allow multiple email integrations to be created
  • Fixed quantity parameter in BBCode instant checkout generator
  • Added pagination to coupon list
  • Fixed custom product price names not being used on v2 carts in some cases
  • Fixed import customer feature not importing the last line of the CSV file
  • Added customer filter for whether or not they have opted out of newsletters

PayPal is Having IPN Issues, DPD Vendors affected

  • Jason@DPD
  • January 28, 2013
  • No Comments

There have been numerous reports of purchases failing to activate in DPD this morning.

This is caused by a failure of the IPN system on PayPal’s side as outlined in this post by PayPal. As of Jan 28, 12:00 PM PST (Jan 28, 8:00 PM GMT) the IPN system is still broken.

If PayPal does not send the IPNs we can’t activate downloads. This will cause purchases to not appear in your DPD admin and no downloads or activation codes will be delivered by DPD. This is not a problem with DPD or your account- this is a failure of the PayPal payment notification system and there is nothing DPD or the vendor can do except to wait for them to fix it.

Updates from PayPal:

UPDATE 5: We have implemented a fix and IPNs for transactions processed after Jan 28, 10:47 AM PST (Jan 28, 6:47 PM GMT) are being sent now. We are expecting IPNs for new transactions to start being delivered in near real-time within the next hour. We are also estimating that missing IPNs for transactions processed between Jan 27, 11:04 PM PST (Jan 28, 7:04 AM GMT) and Jan 28, 10:47 AM PST (Jan 28, 6:47 PM GMT) will be delivered within the next 24 hours.

We will provide the next update by Jan 28, 3:30 PM PST (Jan 28, 11:30 PM GMT).

UPDATE 6: IPNs for new transactions are currently being delivered in near real-time. We are currently deliverying the IPNs for transactions between Jan 27, 11:04 PM PST (Jan 28, 7:04 AM GMT) and Jan 28, 10:47 AM PST (Jan 28, 6:47 PM GMT). We expect to complete this within the next 24 hours.

We will provide the next update by Jan 28, 7:00 PM PST (Jan 29, 3:00 AM GMT).
Sent Jan 28, 3:26 PM PST by SC

New Year, New Features! UPS & FedEx Shipping Calculations, Constant Contact and Sendy Integrations, Bug Fixes

  • Jason@DPD
  • January 7, 2013
  • 1 Comment

In our first release of the new year we’re releasing some often requested shipping and email marketing integrations, as well as a few bug fixes and tweaks that cropped up during the holidays.

UPS and FedEx Shipping Calculations

Now, in addition to table rate shipping, DPD vendors can enable automatic rate calculation for UPS and FedEx.

Setting up UPS Shipping

Setting up Fedex Shipping

These new options are in addition to our existing simple table rate based shipping calculations, and you can enable any combination for use on your cart.

Constant Contract and Sendy Integrations

Adding to our ever growing list of stuff we integrate with, we’ve added Constant Contact and Sendy to our 3rd party mailing list integrations.

Email, Event, and Social Media marketing tools and solutions from Constant Contact make it easy to reach, engage, acquire, and retain customers or members.

Setting up Constant Contact in DPD

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). Complete with reports, subscriber & list management.

Setting up Sendy in DPD

Bug Fixes and Tweaks included in this release:

  • Fixed subscription cancelation / closed account bug
  • Fixed rounding error when calculating multiple tax rates in the cart
  • Fixed quantity error on DPD IPN response, added tax, mc_shipping, shipping_method fields
  • Fixed PayPal refunds displaying the wrong sale amount after a refund was issued
  • Added accepted card type option to SagePay Direct payment method
  • E-commerce integrations now render on the “thankyou” page for free checkouts

Update: Custom Field Improvements, Subscription Failed Payments Dunning, Automatic Virus Notifications

  • Jason@DPD
  • December 18, 2012
  • No Comments

In this update we’ve released two major feature improvements:

Custom Field Improvements: External / Hidden Custom Fields and IPN / API passthrough

Vendors can now create hidden “external” custom fields in DPD and pass data to these fields through their add-to-cart URLs. The data will be stored with the transaction, and vendors can now get custom field data from both the DPD IPN System and the new DPD Cart API.

Adding custom field data to your add-to-cart URLs is as easy as appending a “custom_1=foo” to the end of the URL. This feature will solve a lot of advanced integration requests for vendors such as passing referral or ad source codes to DPD to include with the purchase, or passing landing page versions or sales page A/B testing info to DPD for later analysis.

An example of how to include this data in a DPD add-to-cart URL is available in our Cart Custom Fields knowledgebase entry.

For more information in our KB:


Content Subscription Dunning Settings

DPD now gives vendors control over their dunning settings for handling failed subscription payments made through Stripe. Vendors can set the number of retry attempts and the number of days between retries when a credit card payment fails using the new Dunning option in the left menu for subscription stores. Once the failed payment attempts have been exhausted subscriber content access will be terminated.

Vendors can disable dunning by setting rebill attempts to 0 in their dunning settings. This will terminate access to subscription content without warning on the first failed payment and is probably a pretty bad idea, but the option is there!

DPD will automatically send a failed payment email when one occurs. This email contains a link for the subscriber to log in to the subscription area and update their credit card info. Vendors can edit this email along with all other subscription emails (or product store emails for that matter) by going to Email Templates in the left menu after logging in to DPD.

Automatic Virus Notifications

DPD regularly scans our servers and all uploaded products for viruses, trojans, and other malware. We do this for a number of reasons- PCI compliance, to protect our service’s reputation for delivering safe products, and to not be a vector for malicious users to deliver malware.

Previously, we’ve had to manually email vendors when we find a virus and tell them to clean their files up. As DPD has grown, this became a major pain to follow up with! Now, we’ll automatically send a notification when we detect an infected upload and automatically take action if the vendor does not upload a clean file.

If you get an infected file notification, take action! We can not allow distribution of infected files through our service under any circumstance.

This is nothing personal against the vendor! We do this to protect your customers, your business reputation, and DPD’s reputation as a safe and secure file delivery system.

Update: Introducing the DPD Cart API

  • Jason@DPD
  • December 5, 2012
  • No Comments

Today we’ve released our first public API for getting data out of DPD. The DPD cart API is intended for programmers who want to integrate 3rd party systems with DPD.

The DPD API is a read-only window into your DPD account. It gives you access to storefronts, products, purchases, and subscriber data. The API does not support modifying any data at this time.

Along with the API we’ve released reference documentation and a sample PHP Library to get you started.

DPD API Information:

Let us know if you have any feedback for the API. It’s a new feature and a work in progress so we welcome your input!

Other Fixes and Improvements in this update:

  • Added required option for custom field checkboxes
  • Updated support tab to include knowledgebase search
  • Fixed a problem with creating bundle purchases using the customer import feature
  • Fixed a problem that caused duplicating products to not duplicate the product image

Expanded EU VAT Support

  • Jason@DPD
  • November 20, 2012
  • No Comments

For vendors in the European Union, DPD can now automatically insert the required EU VAT country rules. It’s as easy as clicking a button to configure all the country rules in one step!

For customers who supply a valid VAT ID, DPD will remove the VAT charge from the cart total. VAT IDs are verified using VIES.

To enable EU VAT support, vendors need to do two things:

  • Enable the VAT field in their cart theme
  • Add the EU VAT tax rules for EU countries to your DPD cart tax calculations



For full details and step by step instructions on how to configure your store to do EU VAT calculations please view our knowledgebase article: EU VAT Support

New Feature: Import Customers in to DPD

  • Jason@DPD
  • November 19, 2012
  • No Comments

Vendors can now import customers for product stores. This is handy for when you have buyers through another marketplace who you want to track and send product updates to through DPD, or buyers who purchased through another shopping cart before you made the switch to DPD.

You can only create a purchase for a single item with the import customer feature, but you can create as many single item purchases as you need for any given customer if you need records for multiple item purchases.

Once a buyer is imported you can use all DPD features such as the Send Product Update and Customer Newsletter features to communicate with your buyers.

[box]Please note: The import buyer feature is not available for DPD free trials. This is to prevent spammers from creating DPD free accounts and importing email addresses to send spam using our email features.[/box]

The import buyer feature uses a simple CSV (comma separated value) spreadsheet to import customer and purchase records in to DPD. The only required fields are the product ID that was purchased and the buyer email, although many optional fields are supported like name, price, discounts, shipping, taxes and more.

Full details on supported fields and formats as well as a template CSV file to perform the import is available in our knowledge base at the Import Customers page.