DPD Blog

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...

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...

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...

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: API Reference PHP Library More 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...

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

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. 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. The import buyer feature uses...

In today's update we've released two new features and a tweak to our new Custom Fields feature related to free checkouts. Edit Purchase Customer Info You can now edit a purchase and change the name and email associated with that purchase. If the customer email that you're changing the purchase to exists in your account already, we'll automatically merge them. If they don't, we'll create a new customer record. Additionally, for tangible orders you can edit the shipping address for the order. Of course, this only applies to orders with tangible goods and not downloadable orders. This, along with the existing ability to change a customer record, should allow you to resolve any issues where a customer changes their email, typo's their info, etc. Set Default Payment Method Most vendors allow for checkout through multiple methods, for example Stripe and PayPal. If you prefer to mark one processor as the...

This week's update deals mainly with updates and improvements to the admin interface for vendors. Admin Interface Update We add a lot of features to DPD at a rapid pace. As a result, sometimes our admin interface gets a bit cluttered, has mis-matched form styles, and other inconsistencies that drive us nuts and make it harder to use for you guys. We've converted all the forms and UI elements to use the excellent Bootstrap CSS library and Less. You'll find that all the forms, buttons, page headers, and other elements have a more consistent appearance. It's also less complicated than our old form styling, so we'll be able to add features easier in the future. That's good for everybody! Delivery Page Tweaks We removed the "Thank you for your order !" line on the delivery page. People wanted to customize it, remove it, and everything else, so we opted to...

Every author, writer or content creator has the opportunity to directly interact with the target audience today. In the past, it’s been necessary to write something and submit it to publishing companies and hopefully catch a break at some point on the way to becoming a famous or at least a somewhat successful writer. Doing the actual writing is a process in itself, but the end of the writing and editing process is only the middle of the journey. Today, the writer has a few more duties to take on in order to become successful. Here are three things writers need to successfully launch an e-book. 1. An Interested Audience You might think this is a bit backward in concept. After all, aren’t you supposed to do the writing and then the audience will form around the book? That’s true, but only to a point. In the past, the publisher...

Today we've released a minor improvement update for DPD that tweaks existing features and adds a new weekly sales summary email. Weekly Sales Summary Each vendor using DPD will now receive a weekly sales summary email every Monday morning that includes a summary of all sales (and DPD service updates) from the past week. Vendors can disable the summary email in their profile by going Account > Profile in the top menu bar. If you're currently getting the per-sale notification emails from DPD and think you're geting too many but still want to stay on top of sales then the weekly sales report might be right up your alley! As with all new features, we're looking for feedback on the sales report emails. We've already received some very good feedback and we'll continue to gather more, then make updates based on what vendors want to see. Send us a ticket...