Cerizmo.com is closing it’s service on May 14, 2012. As a result, they have recommended that their users switch to DPD to continue selling downloads. This post is intended to clear up any questions Cerizmo users may have.
How does DPD work?
DPD works almost exactly like Cerizmo. You upload your products to DPD and set a price and product options. DPD gives you HTML button code for you to copy-and-paste in to your website. When a customer buys your products, DPD sends them to your choice of processor for payment directly to you. Once the customer has paid, DPD provides them with a unique, expiring download page for them to get their products.
Like Cerizmo, DPD charges a flat monthly fee with no transaction fees, bandwidth fees, or commissions.
How is DPD different?
DPD offers numerous product types: Digital Downloads, Keycodes, Tangible Goods, and Service Products are possible
DPD allows you to have more than one “store” in your account, so you can sell on multiple websites, all with their own customizations, from one DPD account.
DPD support is provided by the developers and is currently under active development. We’re constantly adding new features and improvements every week!
Ok, I’m ready to switch. How do I get my products in DPD?!
First, create a free trial account. You’ll be asked some questions about your store and where we should send buyers to pay. Once you have completed this initial setup, you’ll be sent to the Dashboard, our overview page for your account.
The left menu contains all the day-to-day product, store, and customer management tools.
You have 2 options to get your products in to DPD:
1. One at a time
2. Bulk Upload using FTP
If you only have a few products it may be easier for you to just create them one at a time. Our product setup wizard guides you through the upload and setup process. To create a single product, simply click the New Product link at the top of the left menu.
If you have many products, the Bulk FTP Upload option is the best. You can get your FTP information by clicking the FTP Import link in the left menu. Once your products are uploaded they will appear on this same page. You simply need to go here, select the upload you want to make a product for, and follow the link to create a product.
Once your products are set up, go to the Button Creator link in the left menu. Here you can create cart button code to replace the Cerizmo buttons on your website.
I need Help!
We’re here for you. Use the “Need Help?” form in the bottom right of every DPD page to submit a support ticket, or browse our knowledgebase for more information.
We’ve released a much requested feature- the ability to make buyers accept an End-User License Agreement (EULA) / Terms and Conditions before an item can be added to their cart. This is a feature of the [intlink id=”1260″ type=”post”]new cart and checkout[/intlink], so you’ll need to upgrade if you haven’t already done so (it’s easy and free!).
Adding an EULA to a Product
The new EULA feature is per product. To add an EULA to any product simply create a new or edit an existing product and enable the End-User License Agreement feature. Paste your EULA in to the text box and save your product.
Check the Enable EULA box and enter your terms and conditions of sale.
This will display the EULA and require the buyer to hit the accept button before the product can be added to their cart. For instant checkout products, the EULA will be displayed for acceptance before the buyer goes to their processor specific checkout.
Customizing the EULA Page
You might want to change what your EULA is called, for example change the name to “Product Terms” or add additional text to the EULA page. You can easily do this by editing the EULA page options- after logging in to DPD go to Theme in the left menu, edit your current theme, and open the EULA page template options. Like all pages in the new DPD cart and checkout, the EULA page will be decorated by the layout file so you can match it to your website’s look and feel.
You can see the EULA page in action by adding the DPD Demo Product to your cart using the button below:
Today we’re pleased to release upgraded 2Checkout (2CO) support to a full cart processor for our new cart and checkout.
2Checkout.com (2CO) is a worldwide leader in payments and e-commerce services. 2CO powers online sellers with a global platform of payment methods and a world-class fraud prevention service on secure and reliable PCI-compliant payment pages.
2Checkout’s payments platform bundles a gateway and merchant account into one single offering with no need to contract with a merchant bank or manage separate agreements. You can accept Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover, PayPal, Diner’s Club, JCB and Debit cards (in the U.S.) from one solution through 2Checkout’s fully secure hosted payment pages. In addition, 2CO provides call center support, full SSL certification, and the system is translatable in 15 languages and 26 international currencies for buyers and sellers in over 200 countries.
Use promo code DPD2CO for a full waiver of 2Checkout’s $49 signup fee! Visit www.2checkout.com , click “Sign Up Now”, complete the application, and then enter the code into the promo code field to get started with no signup fee.
Integrating DPD with 2Checkout is easy and only takes a minute. For more information, view our KB article 2Checkout Processor Setup
Other fixes and improvements in this update:
Added the ability to edit customer name and email on file in DPD
Added optional phone number field to shipping address collection in the new cart. Turn on phone number collection by going to Theme > Current Theme > Shipping in DPD.
Today’s update fixes several bad French translations for the v2 cart. Special thanks go to Christophe, a DPD vendor who assisted with the translations.
Also in this update:
Fixed v2 cart not saving language selection
Fixed GetResponse integration not marking customers as active and part of the campaign (cycle_day=0)
Today’s update includes several updates to the version 2 cart:
The cart will now use your customer’s location to guess the selected country. If a location could not be found it still defaults to US.
You can now customize the text that’s displayed next to the payment methods.
All new stores now default to using the version 2 cart.
You can now customize the cart button color if you don’t like the blue.
You can now choose which countries you want to support. You can also float your primary countries to the top of the list by marking them as “Priority” countries.
Quantity is now hidden on the cart and on delivery if the product doesn’t support multiple quantities to be purchased at one time.
Fixed store image not appearing on PayPal checkout.
Fixed product description wrapping on cart view.
Response to the version two cart has been overwhelmingly positive! Thank you for all of your great feedback.
In addition to version 2 fixes we also upgraded the store chooser to remember your last store between logins.
This publish also ends our support for PayDotCom and 2Checkout. You will no longer have the option of using these processors when creating a new store. These payment processors accounted for less than 0.1% of all checkouts combined. However they required a large amount of testing and were a support burden. Dropping support will free us up to add features to DPD even faster. If you have an existing store that uses PayDotCom or 2Checkout it will continue to work and we will do our best to keep it running for you.
This is going to be a long post, but we’ve never released an update like this before!
Digital Product Delivery was started as a simple instant checkout and delivery system for single, standalone products. As we grew, customers requested features and we bolted them on as well as we could, but after a couple years we were in a corner. We had a place where we wanted DPD to be, but we couldn’t get there with our current cart.
About 8 months ago we sat down and looked at what we needed to do to make Digital Product Delivery the best platform selling and delivering downloads, keycodes, and tangible goods. There were no sacred cows- we decided that whatever we had to do we were going to do it, even if we had to rewrite the whole whole darn thing.
Well, we did.
We’re pleased to announce the all new DPD cart, checkout, and delivery system. The new cart has been rewritten from the ground up to support the advanced features that our vendors have been clamoring for. Written with expansion and improvements in mind, we designed it so future features could be added rapidly through an integration system.
New Cart Features:
Redesigned, Modern Cart and Checkout
The New DPD Cart The new DPD cart and checkout has been designed with two goals in mind:
1. To improve conversions for DPD vendors
2. To be easy to customize and integrate with your website
The default look of the new DPD cart and checkout is modern, clean, and designed to blend well with today’s websites. Drawing from case studies and industry reports, we’ve designed the new cart to improve conversions and provide a smooth, secure checkout flow.
Of course, we know you want to customize it and make it your own, so we made it easier than ever to completely integrate the DPD cart with your own website. Vendors can easily add text, turn fields on and off, change colors, or use their own logo without ever touching a bit of code. If you’re a designer or handy around the HTML, you can now edit one layout file and wrap the entire cart, checkout, and delivery process in your own site’s design. We provide a visual editor too, so even if you don’t know the first thing about HTML you can still tweak the look to your heart’s content.
Authorize.net is the most popular gateway in the US. With an Authorize.net gateway account money is settled to your own merchant account daily, making it a great choice for established businesses or those who need immediate access to their funds.
Stripe is a full-stack credit card payments processor for US merchants. You don’t need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account.
Stripe integration with DPD is so easy a caveman can do it! Best of all, Stripe is reasonably priced at 2.9% + 30 cents per successful charge. No setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, and no hidden costs. To get started head over to Stripe.com and create an account
Website Payments Pro is PayPal’s credit card processing product. Website Payments Pro is a paid add-on to your PayPal account. With competitive rates, it’s a good choice for those who want to offer credit card payment in addition to PayPal checkout.
Powerful Shipping and Tax Calculation right in the DPD Cart
One of our number one complaints was how poorly various processors handled shipping and tax. And, with the new in-cart credit card processors above we needed a way for vendors to charge shipping and tax without ever leaving the DPD cart. With this in mind we’ve added table based shipping and tax calculations.
Sales tax? VAT? GST/PST? No problem. DPD can now handle all those by country, state/region, or zip code. Need to only charge tax on tangible goods but not downloads? Yep, you can do that too. We even do compound taxes!
Sell physical products and need to create complicated shipping rules? DPD allows you to create rules based on location, weight, quantity, number of items, order total, or any combination of them all. Want to give free shipping, but only to customers in the UK who spend $100 and order 3 items? You can do that!
We’ll be adding more shipping options, including automatic rate quotes from major carriers like UPS, Fedex, USPS, and Royal Mail, soon!
Your Own Subdomain at dpdcart.com
Every new cart will have it’s own unique URL at yourstore.dpdcart.com. This branding in the URL helps customers feel secure and adds legitimacy to your store. We have some exciting future features coming up that will use this, so stay tuned!
Access to Future Features
The new cart is the future of DPD. We’ll still continue to support the old cart for some time, but all new feature development will be on the new cart and checkout system. This includes new discount and cross-sale features, new processors, new shipping tools, and more!
Ok, How Do I Get It?
If your cart is eligible for upgrade to the new cart and checkout you’ll see a Upgrade Cart! link in the left menu under store setup. This will guide you through the 1-step upgrade process where you’ll pick your custom sub-domain. It’s easy! But first…
There are some things you need to know:
The upgrade process is one way- you can’t go back to the old cart once you upgrade. However, all your old links on your website will continue to work- we’ll make them point to the new cart automatically!
Any existing customizations other than tracker HTML and store image will be lost. It’s all new!
The v2 cart only supports PayPal, AlertPay, and the new merchant account processors.
Google Checkout and PayDotCom are not supported by the v2 cart. 99.9% of our vendors report to us that they use these processors because “They’re not PayPal.” They account for less than 3% of transactions through the whole of DPD, and their support is abysmal if you need help. We’re providing much better options for our vendors with the new processors above, and more are on the way. It is undecided at this time if support for these processors will ever be added (but probably not).
The Future…
Soon we’ll make the new cart default for all new stores and accounts. We’ve got a lot planned for the future!
More payment processors, including UK and international processors like SagePay.
More shipping integrations like UPS, Fedex, USPS, Royal Mail, and anyone else we can find a rate API for.
Up-sales, cross-sales, automatic discounts, and other advanced in-cart sales tools.
Subscriptions! More on this on later, but it’s going to be awesome.
Mobile Checkout, Mobile Vendor Access, and other mobile device features.
Maybe even Streaming video delivery and more secure delivery options!
On December 10th, 2011, Louis CK, a popular and well known stand-up comedian, producer, and TV star (of his own show, Louie) offered up his Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater stand-up performance on his website for viewing and download, with no DRM, for $5 via PayPal.
On December 13th, he issued a statement on his website that had some amazing sales numbers:
The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000.
So it’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden.
By anyone’s measure his self-distributed, download and streaming sale of Live at the Beacon Theater was a resounding success. He made so much money (and is such an awesome and socially responsible guy) that he gave $250K to his staff as bonuses and $280K to various charities, according to his statement. I bought it, and it was well worth the $5 price knowing that the proceeds from the sale went direct to the artist.
Jim Gaffigan is going to try the same thing
Today in a statement on his website, comedian Jim Gaffigan has announced that, inspired by Louis CK, he will debut his new stand-up special Jim Gaffigan: Mr. Universe on his website at jimgaffigan.com for $5.
Gaffigan also states that he will be donating $1 for every $5 purchase to charity.
He lists his reasons:
I know I am taking a risk here. People I respect have advised me to take the safer, more traditional route with the premiere of the special. However, I am incredibly motivated by the courage of Louie to offer his fans direct access for a low price. Buyers of my special can be assured that their money will go directly to feeding and raising my four children instead of a giant corporation. I will self-produce a high quality special with all new material that will be incredibly easy to download and then you will own it. Forever. For $5. Roughly the price of five packs of Ramen Noodles. And believe me my special is going to be much better than five packs of disgusting Ramen Noodles. Gross.
At DPD we think this is an exciting trend- With “experiments” like Louis CK’s bringing in over a million dollars more and more comedians and other big name artists will look at self-distribution online. We think this will get the public used to buying digital content direct from the artists website. That will benefit every self-distributed vendor of download content as the public becomes more comfortable with buying their content from the creator and not a big media conglomerate or central media store like iTunes or Amazon.
Are these results typical? No, these are famous comedians with thousands and thousands of fans. The typical DPD vendor might have hundreds of purchases a month, but nowhere near $1M in revenue. That’s not the point though- the point is that these famous comedians are going against the established distribution model, selling their own content (just like every DPD vendor) and winning. This benefits everyone!
PS- Now if we could only get them to use DPD instead of paying $35,000 for a website that does what DPD does for tens of thousands less….
We’ve just released another update (two days in a row!) that adds some much requested options to the extremely popular PDF Stamping / Buyer Tracking feature.
Vendors can now:
Enable or Disable Stamping / Buyer Tracking on PDF products
Customize the stamp text using available merge vars outlined in our KB article
Set the Tracking Page Limit (for if you only want to stamp the title pages, etc.)
Set the Font Color to make the text stand out or blend in
Set the Font Size – from 6pt all the way up to 20pt!
Set the X and Y position of the stamp to put it right where you want it.
On Y and Y Positions
The X and Y positions are specified in points. There are 72 points in an inch.
The new X and Y positions can be tricky- every PDF has an “origin” that the X and Y coordinates offset from. For most Portrait 8 1/2″ x 11″ pages the origin is in the bottom left corner (and the default stamp is x20, y10 putting it just up and over so it appears in the bottom left corner) but for other page sizes, landscape layout, and non-default page sizes it could be in the bottom right.
To help you figure it out and get it just right we’ve also added a preview link where you can open your PDF and see the stamp exactly where it will appear when buyers purchase it. You might have to fiddle with it for a bit to get it right, but the preview means you can rapidly check where it’s printing and adjust in no time.
Today we published a minor update that includes a number of customer requested features and a few bug fixes and tweaks.
Mark Products as Coupon Eligible
DPD vendors can now mark individual products as coupon eligible when editing a product. This is a simple on/off checkbox setting that when unchecked will exclude the product from all coupon calculations, both fixed and percentage based. This is useful for when you have a new product that you don’t want to allow coupons on, but want coupons to be valid for your older stock, etc.
Added {product_keys} Merge Var to Email Templates
Vendors can now print the product keys in a purchase directly to the Purchase Ready email. The {product_keys} merge var will print all the product keys in an order, one per line, in a productname: key format like so:
The {product_keys} merge var has been added to the default email template. If you have customized your email template you’ll need to manually add it where you would like it to appear.
Customer List Now Shows Customer Counts
We’re not really sure why we didn’t have this in there sooner, but a vendor pointed out to us that there was no way to get a customer count for people who have purchased from a store. We’ve added a count to the customer list, based on the filter results, just like the purchase list works.
Other Bug Fixes and Tweaks
Reports page now includes coupons in calculations
A broken link to a KB articles was fixed
Fixed a redirect issue with out support desk
Added ability to search purchases by coupon
Fixed a bug with Aquatic Prime licenses
Fixed a bug where customers who bought from more than one store on a vendor’s account didn’t show up for both stores
Fixed a bug that created a 404 error when editing email templates
DPD vendors now have the ability, with one click, to update all previous buyers of a download product with the currently uploaded file. This feature is included with all plans $10/mo or more at no additional cost.
On the product detail page (available for each product on the Products list in DPD) you now have a button at the top to “Send Product Update.” This button will open a form that looks strangely similar to our “Send Customer Newsletter” feature but has one key difference- When this email is sent to your buyers it will also include a new, reactivated purchase link to the customer so they can download the currently uploaded version of your product file.
This feature works for two types of products: Download and Bundle / Combo products that contain a download product.
Download Products:
Sending an updated download to your customers is very straightforward- Go to the product’s detail page, click the Send Product Update button, optionally select a purchase date range you want to update (for example, if you only want to update the people that bought since the Jan 1st, 2012), edit your update email message where you can include what is new in this version, a thank you message, etc., and send!
All your customers who purchased that product will have their purchases reactivated, an email sent to them with the new purchase link and your message, and will be able to download the currently uploaded product file.
Bundled / Combo Products:
You send a bundled product update the same way as a download, but how DPD handles them is a bit different. For bundles that contain a download, DPD will re-evaluate every purchase and add (or remove) the current set of items in the combo before reactivating the download and sending the link / email.
This means-
If you just update the currently attached products in the bundle, the customer will get the new versions of the files in the attached products.
If you add an item to the bundle (such as a new template, supplemental PDF, etc.) the customer will have the new items you added to the bundle available on their download page when you send the product update.
If you remove an item from the bundle (for instance, outdated instructions or something you combined with another product in the combo) the item will be removed and not available to the customer when you send a product update.
Lets take a moment to talk about the implications of this feature.
Now, when you sell a product you can include free updates for a period of time (or forever) with the purchase. All you have to do when you update is upload the new file for your product to DPD, send the product update, and you’re done! DPD will automatically handle the download reactivation and sending of the emails. Easy!
Lets say you sell a product that has additional items you regularly add to enhance or expand the product. For example, a website script. You might make more themes for this script available on a regular basis and need to distribute them to your paying customers securely. If you create your product as a bundle with the main script + any additional themes, you can easily add a new theme at any time to the bundle, send a product update, and DPD will re-evaluate all previous purchases, find any parts that were added after the customer bought your bundle, add them, and send the product update!
In this way products and supplemental files can be updated with one click, delivering more value and content to your buyers.
We’re really excited about this feature and welcome any feedback you may have on it- specifically, we’re looking for how we can make it fit how you do business and make it a more valuable feature for everyone. Email options? More filters to narrow the customer group that gets updates? Let us know!
Other fixes and changes in this update:
– Changed Profile to Account in the top menu to more accurately describe the items functions
– Fixed an issue with tax and coupons that resulted in a PayPal bug on checkout
– A few typo fixes
– Changed the from: address in newsletter (and the new product update feature above) to come from Store Name
– Improvements to purchase log to store information about product updates and combo re-evaluations
– Tweaked some table alignment / visual elements in the admin
DPD is an all-in-one shopping cart and digital fulfillment service for downloadable products. Serving thousands of stores, DPD processes and delivers millions worth of downloads each year.
