DPD Blog

In 2009, comScore reported that online spending increased 5 percent on Cyber Monday to $887 Million. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday being the two busiest online shopping days of the year, we thought it was a great time to share with DPD vendors how to make special, limited coupons to entice sales during these spending frenzies. DPD's coupon controls offer a couple unique features to build excitement and offer a compelling call to action for your buyers that are especially applicable to seasonal sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Use Limits - "50% Off Only To The First 100 Customers!" DPD coupons can be configured to only work for a specified number of uses. This is great for promotions where the first X number of people get a special deal, or to limit the total number of people that can take advantage of the offer. Activation / Deactivation...

Today has been one heck of a day for PayPal. They have been having problems with their API system, Webflow system, Website, Developer Sandbox and just about everything else. This has caused all manner of havoc for vendors and your loving DPD support staff. It's never fun for us to tell vendors that PayPal just isn't working, even when it's completely out of our control, but we've had to several times today. We just pushed an update to DPD that should help mitigate some of the purchase errors that some vendors are getting, and hopefully this will fix 99% of the problems that DPD vendors are having today. Some purchases for a number of vendors were not activated when PayPal failed to send out Instant Purchase Notifications (IPNs) or malformed IPN data. DPD uses this IPN data to verify that a purchase was paid for, so when PayPal doesn't send...

Seamus Anthony, a Melbourne, Australia-based musician and DPD user has written a great article on taking advantage of internet marketing techniques to promote music as an independent artist. He talks about not only getting more exposure for your music, but also making sales: Classic Internet marketing is not usually the kind of thing that musicians tend to consider appropriate for promoting their art. Yet to me, giving it a go makes perfect sense because getting more Facebook “likes” or YouTube views is one thing, and an important thing, but it’s not a sale. He also mentions DPD as a platform for not only selling your music, but also as a content delivery network for distributing your free track downloads. Give it a look: Do Internet Marketing Techniques Work for Selling Music?

Why does it seem like we only update on Fridays now? This morning we released an update that brings enhanced security options to PDF products. In addition to PDF Buyer Tracking / Stamping that marks each page of the PDF with the buyer’s information to discourage sharing, DPD can now automatically encrypt your PDF documents to prevent tampering and minimize plagiarism and abuse. Using the new feature, DPD will automatically encrypt your PDF document to lock future editing. You also have the option to prevent printing as well as prevent copying of the PDF contents (disables copying and pasting of the PDF text). You can use the new PDF encryption feature with or without PDF Buyer Tracking / Stamping. When you use both, DPD will automatically add your tracking stamp to the pages you specify, then encrypt the PDF to prevent removal. Like all DPD features, setting up PDF encryption...

As many of you have noticed, the payment pending page is popping up a lot more often than it used to. PayPal released an updated website a couple of weeks ago and removed one of the features we used to ensure quick, reliable payment. Our old pending page was really meant only to be displayed in extreme cases and was in all honesty a bit scary for your customers to see. As of five minutes ago, we've changed the payment pending page to be a more friendly "working" page that looks like this: We've also changed this page to update every 15 seconds. Also in this update: Added product purchase limits. You can now offer limited availability products. Your billing history now has printable invoices for your records. Product key codes longer than 40 characters can now be entered without causing the code to split. Combo/bundle products can now include...

TGIF!   This is just a quick heads-up reminder all DPD vendors using the DPD MailChimp Integration that they have a planned outage this weekend on October 10 at 1 AM ET.  They anticipate the outage will last from 2 - 4 hours while they upgrade their systems. From the MailChimp Blog: We’re moving a large portion of MailChimp’s brain power to a much bigger, much faster server. Our recent growth, and the rapid uptake of Social Pro (there were more than 50 million social data queries since we made it free 2 weeks ago in v5.3), mean we have to add extra capacity much sooner than anticipated. and... Most of our upgrades are like changing tires on a moving car: we rarely pull over to stop, because your emails, your open tracking, and your list subscriptions never stop. But this upgrade is more like swapping out our engine (and adding...

We've added coupons that only apply to one product! Yes, we can hear you in the back muttering finally. We really don't know why we waited this long to add them. Hop on over to your coupon list and restrict your coupons until your clicking finger gets a cramp. Percentage coupons apply to the subtotal for that product while fixed price coupons only apply that amount off, regardless of the quantity in the cart. We're a little up in the air about the best way to handle fixed price product coupons. Drop us a support ticket or add a comment to this post and we'll make it work however you guys think is best. Also in this update: Google Checkout edit cart and continue shopping URLs are now automatically supported. A few style fixes. The customer list has been cleaned up quite a bit. We were a bit embarrassed about...

The website is dead. Long live the website! It's no secret that our old website was looking a bit... dated. Today at 3pm Eastern we rolled out a spiffy new website to match the spiffy vendor site we released to you guys a couple of months ago. What do you think? Better or way better?

Today's release brings a handful of changes to DPD. Updated Purchase List We've upgraded everyone's purchase list with useful new features: Search for purchases by customer name. Date range presets save you a few seconds every time you use them. Sales total is now displayed at the top of the purchase list. You no longer have to add up all those numbers by hand! Export as CSV feature lets you import the data into Excel or any other program that supports reading CSV files. SSL Everywhere DPD now uses HTTPS (secure HTTP) for every admin and delivery page on the site. This makes DPD 100% safe to use on insecure networks like public WiFi. All existing carts and buy now buttons will be automatically redirected to HTTPS without any intervention on your part. All new buttons will use HTTPS by default. Miscellaneous Changes Added option to email affiliates when posting...

Here at DPD we maintain a content delivery and ecommerce network that delivers thousands of products. This generates a mountain of data on product sizes, product prices, sales volume, most popular product types, etc. We're serious about our privacy policy though, and we never share or sell sales information about any vendor or their product performance to 3rd parties. We do however use anonymous sales and product data to plan our infrastructure and future features to to provide the best possible service to our vendors. This data includes things like product size, product price, product type (video, pdf, etc.), and how many sales they've had. This helps us gauge our storage and bandwidth requirements and is a crucial tool for us to make sure we have enough capacity to meet demand. In this post we'd like to share a few of those anonymous product statistics with you for fun and...