DPD Blog

Happy new year! We have just released a few upgrades to DPD. URLs can now be delivered via the key delivery product type. No configuration is needed on your part. Simply enter a key that starts with "http://" or "https://" and we will link to that URL on the delivery page. We have added an option to override PayPal shipping settings and always ship a product for free. Bug fixes: Fixed a problem with delivered filename getting corrupted when using filenames with special characters. Fixed a problem with the FTP drop box not working when the filename has a "#" character in it. Fixed a problem activating ClickBank combo products when delivered through the thankyou page.

This week we added a new feature to our website- live chat through Olark. The verdict so far? We love it. We don't often write about other services here, but we're really pleased and think that live chat could be a powerful tool to help our vendors with their sales and conversions so we're going to tell you our experience thus far- Olark has a different approach to live chat than many other services- they use the common XMPP protocol for their chat servers instead of proprietary software. For those not up to date on chat protocols, the XMPP protocol is the same thing that Jabber, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and a host of other chat services use. XMPP support is built in to every multi-protocol chat client and is a snap to set up. Here at DPD that's pretty important- I'm on Windows 7, Jacob is on a Mac,...

Instant Payment Notifications (IPNs) are key to how DPD processes and validates PayPal orders. We receive an IPN for each successful purchase that triggers an email and activates the buyer's purchase. To make sure we are receiving an actual IPN from PayPal to prevent unauthorized download, DPD contacts and verifies each IPN with PayPal. We either get a VALID or INVALID response. In the past week or so we noticed a spike in failed IPN verifications from PayPal due to the continued rollout of PayPal's new site. These sort of breakages aren't uncommon with PayPal and they're reasonably quick to address these types of issues. We normally don't have to make any changes on our end before PayPal rolls out a fix. This time was different- There was no fix or even mention of the issue on PayPal's site and failed IPN verifications were piling up. So we dug into...

We're happy to announce beta support for AlertPay as a processor choice for your DPD cart! Adding an AlertPay product is easy: Create a new website Choose AlertPay from the drop-down menu and enter your AlertPay login and IPN code Login to AlertPay and enable IPN support with the URL we display in your website setup Add your product to the new website DPD supports AlertPay for both instant, single item checkout as well as using our multi-item checkout cart. We only support digital and key code products at this time. We will be adding tangible support in the future, along with more processor choices.

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...