DPD Blog

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect on May 25, 2018. This regulation changes how companies use and process the personal data of European users, including vendors outside of the EU that sell to EU buyers. DPD is working toward being compliant with this new EU law and we will be compliant by May 25, 2018. What has DPD already done to comply with the GDPR? Appointed a Data Protection Officer to oversee our data protection program. Added a Data Processing Addendum to our Terms and Conditions of Service, as required by Article 28 of the GDPR. Implemented a Data Protection Impact Assessment process, as required by Articles 35 and 91 of the GDPR. Reviewed our contractual arrangements with sub-processors to ensure that they are required to protect personal data. Conducted GDPR-focused training to key teams and personnel. We have updated our Privacy Policy and...

The Payza.com domain has been seized by the United States Department of Justice. Payza and its associated an parent companies are being indicted on the following charges: 18 u.s.c. § 371 (Conspiracy); 18 U.S.C. § 1960(a) (Operating an Unlicensed Money Transmission Business); 18 u.s.c. § 1956 (h) (Conspiracy to Launder Monetary Instruments); D.C. Stat.§ 26-1001 (Money Transmitting without a License) Additionally, the indictment outlines several other criminal activities such as operating Ponzi and Pyramid schemes, money laundering related to controlled substances, and illegal pornography. The DOJ website posting can be read here: Victim Witness Statement The grand jury indictment can be read here: UNITED STATES vs. MH PILLARS LTD As outlined in the above indictment, the following has been seized or is in the process of being seized: The grand jury finds by probable cause that the specific property subject to forfeiture includes: a. $4,000,100 of Payza funds seized on...

One of the biggest things you can do to improve sales and give a professional appearance to your information products is have a great cover / product photo for your downloadable product. In the case of ebooks or PDFs, this means you need a cover you can use on your website, on your product in DPD to be shown in the cart and customer portal, and when marketing your product. In this post we'll go over some options for creating covers and show you a simple workflow to create your own. You have several options for creating ebook covers: 1. Pay a design professional to create one for you. If you're not a professional graphic designer then this will by far generate the best result. However, many ebook authors are bootstrapping with little to no budget, and designers can cost anywhere from $50-500 for professional cover design, putting it outside...

We often get asked how to integrate DPD with a WIX free website. WIX is a popular What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) website editor because it has a free plan, you don't have to know how to use HTML or CSS to make a website, and they have commercials on cable TV. This post will show you step-by-step how to use the DPD cart with WIX's built in buttons. You can use DPD with a WIX free site to sell downloads, keycodes, and tangible goods. However, there are some limitations: 1. No Overlay Cart. Because WIX sandboxes everything in iframes, using the Lightbox / Overlay of the DPD cart results in the Lightbox opening in that iframe, being unusable. 2. No Fancy Buttons or Widgets WIX free sites do not have a way to add javascript to the site header or footer so our cart.js that powers...

Outlook.com, which is the online inbox for hotmail, msn, live, and outlook.com email addresses, has changed their inbox view to show two tabs– Focused and Other. They call this feature Focused Inbox and its creating issues for lots customers who think they aren't getting their emails. The new Focused inbox is specifically designed to hide transactional emails and newsletters from view in the Other tab. All emails generated by DPD and every other shopping cart on earth are by definition transactional emails, so our emails are being delivered to the Other tab of the inbox. Because this feature is new, Outlook.com (and Hotmail, Live, whatever that uses Microsoft webmail) users have not yet learned that they need to look in their Other tab for transactional emails. This is leading customers to complain to vendors that they did not get their download links or can't find their order emails. DPD emails...

In our previous update we introduced Device Based Activation as an upgrade to our old attempt based system, which created customer service issues for some vendors having to reactivate download links for customers. We've had varying feedback from the thousands of vendors using our platform- everything from "thank you I'm so tired of reactivating customers" to "ugh this won't work because I relied on the old system's behavior in my sales strategy." There was even some "this is new and I don't like anything new I hate you now!" sprinkled in, much like we get with most updates. First I want to explain our reasoning for the change, and what we're doing to accommodate those vendors who do special things with delivery. Why Device Based Activation anyway? The #1 complaint we get in support and on twitter is that vendors are tired of reactivating old download links. We get it-...

Today we've started rolling out a change to how DPD authorizes downloads for buyers. It's a significant change and one that will lead to massive decreases in customer support requests from your customers asking for download reactivation. That said, new can be scary so here is a breakdown of whats changing: Old Download System: Attempt Based Previously, DPD counted download attempts and kept downloads active for a fixed amount of time. This meant that a customer might get 2 attempts to download over 1 week after purchase, and after that their download page was dead. While this is pretty much the standard way things are done with most systems out there, it's a pretty awful experience for the customer AND vendor. After a week (or 2 tries) the customer can't get their product and gets mad. The vendor then has to deal with an angry customer and spend time finding...

DPD vendors in the US will see a new popup when logging in to the DPD admin until Dec 14th. We're showing this popup asking you take action to save Net Neutrality rules because it directly affects your ability to sell your downloadable content with DPD. What is Net Neutrality? Net Neutrality is the basic principle that prohibits internet service providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from speeding up, slowing down or blocking any content, applications or websites you want to use. Net Neutrality is the way that the internet has always worked. Net Neutrality prevents ISP's from restricting access to the sites and content your love. Net Neutrality prevents ISP's from charging you more to access content they don't want you to have. Net neutrality is essential for creative freedom. How Ending Net Neutrality Will Affect DPD Vendors Without Net Neutrality rules in place there will be nothing stopping...

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Over the past few months we've been working on setting up a new environment for DPD to run on that will be scalable, handle bursts in usage better using magical load balancers, be more secure and resistant to attack, and deliver better database performance when people do those really big customer and purchase list searches that used to seem to take forever. I'm happy to say we've completed our migration of the DPD database, admin, cart, and ftp to our new expanded Amazon Web Services environment and everything is... fast. Like, really fast. You should see a noticeably faster admin and checkout for your customers immediately! This is what we're using! Want to nerd out over some technical sounding acronyms? Here you go! ELB - Elastic Load Balancer - to balance load, natch. EC2 - Elastic Computing Cloud - The cart and admin are running on...

On Wednesday, 26 April, 2017 at 9PM Eastern (Check time in your time zone) we will be performing a database migration on DPD that will lead to improved performance for all vendors and buyers. We have run simulations of this move and expect less than 5 minutes of downtime where the site may fail to load when the procedure is started and then degraded performance during the migration, which may last up to 2 hours. During this period of degraded performance certain pages may be slow to load, including "database heavy" pages like purchase and customer list pages, reports pages, and possibly the dashboard depending on your recent sales volume. We apologize for any slow page loads this process may cause, but it will be temporary. The migration to new database hardware will provide expanded memory and processing power for all database operations and will represent a significant speed increase...