Using DPD’s Multiple Price Point Feature

  • Jason@DPD
  • January 6, 2014
  • 6 Comments

One of the least known and understood features of DPD, multiple price points allow you to sell the same product for multiple prices.

How Multiple Price Points Work

There are a few basic rules with multiple price points:

  • All price points for a product deliver the same product, they just charge a different price
  • Anyone with the price point buy URL can purchase the product for that price
  • When you create a product in DPD, you set the “default” price. Alternate price points override the default price and can be higher or lower.
  • If an alternate price point is deleted, DPD will redirect any buyers who visit that price point URL to the default price of the product.
  • Alternate price points are not displayed on the cart index or anywhere else- they are effectively “hidden” prices.
  • You can selectively disable the affiliate system for any price point, so if you don’t want affiliates getting credit for discounted promotions you can do so.



In this article we’re going to go over a handful of sales scenarios using these rules and show you how you can use them to run your own promotions and sales variants of the same product, without using multiple product slots. Finally, we’ll show you how to create multiple price points quickly and easily for any product.

Selling discounted upgrades to previous buyers

In this scenario, lets say you sell a customer Version 1.0 of your product. Eventually, you come out with new and improved Version 2.0.

DPD allows you to export your customer list to CSV as well as automatically send buyers info to one of our supported 3rd party mailing list managers. You can easily create a new, discounted price point for your Version 2.0 product and send the discounted alternate price point buy link directly to your previous buyers while still offering Version 2.0 at the full retail price on your website.

Upgrade Special Price Point


Discounting an item to a mailing list

Similar to the scenario above, lets say you have a mailing list where you send special offers to your customers. You can offer your product for full price on your website using the default price while using the multiple price point feature to send a discounted price point to your mailing list to entice sales.

If you decide to make it a limited time promotion, you can later delete the alternate price point and anyone who follows the link in the email will get automatically redirected to the product’s default price.

Mailing List Special


Selling multiple license tiers for a product

Many vendors who sell business and professional software and books offer multiple seat licensing to companies. For example, you might sell one license of your book for $19.99 or a 5-pack for $99.99.

Since no matter how many licenses they buy they’re still going to get one download of the product (having 5 download buttons for the same file would be silly) you can easily accommodate this sales setup using the multiple price point feature. You would just need to create your product with the default 1 license price, then create alternate price points for multi-license packs.

Multi-User Pricing


Limited time promotions without coupons

Popular with people who post on forums (especially “Warrior Forum” WSOs and other marketing related forums), limited time promotions without coupons are possible by using multiple price points. To achieve this, all you need to do is create your discounted price point and share the buy button or URL. When you’re ready to end the promotion on a set date or after a set number of sales, simply delete the discounted price point.

Anyone who follows the buy link to the now deleted discounted price point will be automatically redirected to the full, non-special retail price.

This is handy because it doesn’t require a coupon to use. And, unlike changing the default price of your product which will affect all buttons for that product everywhere, using an alternate price point allows you to share it with the specific marketing channels you choose while still offering full retail to the rest of the world.

Special Limited Time Offers


Selling different support levels for the same product

Similar to selling multiple license tiers, if you offer different support packages with the same downloadable product you can use multiple price points to offer those packages without using up multiple product slots.

Just create your product with it’s default, lowest level of support and then create a price point for your various support options. If you ever decide to stop offering a specific support option, anyone with the link will be automatically redirected to the default price.

Selling Different Support Options


How to Create Multiple Price Points

Creating a price point is easy:

1. Log in to DPD
2. Go to Products in the left menu to show the product list
3. For the product you want to create an alternate price point for, click its details link
price-points-details

4. Scroll down to the Price Points section and select “Create New Price Point”
create-price-point

5. Enter your display name you want shown in the cart, if you want this product to be available for affiliate sales, and the price you want to charge, then save.
Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 9.48.31 PM

That’s it! Your new price point is created.
Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 9.49.23 PM

To deploy a link or button to your new price point, go to the button creator link for your product:
button-creator

On the button creator page, your new price point will be listed along with your default price in the Product selection- just pick the price you want to create a button or link for and copy and paste the code as you normally would.
Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 9.51.20 PM

That’s it! Remember- if you delete an alternate price point anyone who follows that link from an old post or email will automatically be redirected to the default price so you’ll never miss a potential sale. If you have any questions or comments about the multiple price point feature drop us a comment below or shoot us a support ticket- we’ll be happy to help!

Guide: Setting up and Selling A Pre-Order Product

  • Jason@DPD
  • January 2, 2014
  • 5 Comments

One of the most frequent questions we get at the helpdesk is how to set up and sell a preorder product. We specifically designed many DPD features, working in concert, with smooth and easy selling of pre-order products in mind. This in-depth guide will explain step-by-step how to create and run a pre-order sale.

There are 4 basic steps to selling a pre-order product:

1. Create the pre-order product in DPD before you have your product file
2. Sell the pre-order product on your website
3. Release your actual product on launch day
4. Send the actual product to the previous buyers of the pre-order.

This guide assumes you have a DPD account with a store already set up with a payment processor and ready to go. If you have not created a DPD account and completed the new store setup wizard to activate your first store, please do so before moving on.

Create The Pre-Order Product in DPD

The first thing you need to do is create a product in DPD for your pre-order. This product is like any other product in DPD, except instead of delivering the actual product file the customer is buying it will deliver a message thanking them for their pre-order.

1. Log in to DPD

2. Go to New Product in the left menu to begin creating your pre-order product
Create the Preorder Product Record

3. Select Digital Product as the type.
Select Digital Product type

4. Set the name, price, image, and short description how you would like it to display to pre-order buyers and save to go to Purchase Actions.
Define your preorder product

5. Purchase actions are where you define what DPD should do when a product is purchased. For most products, this is obviously where we would deliver a file or key. For this product, since the file is not ready yet, we’re going to set up a delivery message to be displayed to the pre-order buyer.

To do so, select “Add” beside the Delivery Message action.
Add a delivery message

6. In the delivery message, add your own customer service message thanking them for buying, telling them when the product will be released, etc. This is completely up to you, but we recommend you give them a release date and let them know that a download link will be sent to the email they used to buy the product (either the email they enter during checkout or their PayPal email). Once you’ve crafted your message, save.
Don't forget to spellcheck!

7. Once your delivery message is configured and is green (green means go!) then click the finish product button to complete product setup.
You're done!

You have now configured your pre-order product in DPD.

This product doesn’t do much for the buyer- it just takes their money and tells them thanks for buying- but it’s a vital step in accepting pre-orders since later we’re going to use this same product to update all the pre-order buyers.

Selling Your Pre-Order Product

Selling your pre-order product is just like any other product in DPD- you generate the button code and then copy and paste it to your website.

1. From the Products list, go to the Buttons link for your pre-order product.
Create your button

2. Select your button graphic and copy and paste the code to your website.

Once you place the button code on your website customers will be able to add the pre-order product to their cart (or instant checkout) and purchase it.
Preorder item in the cart

When the buyer completes their purchase, they’ll see the delivery message you configured during product setup thanking them for their order and telling them when they can expect their product to be delivered.
Preorder delivery page

Meanwhile, behind the scenes DPD is tracking who bought the pre-order product, which will be very important when you’re ready to send out the finished product.
DPD Purchase List

Launch Day! Adding Your Finished Product File

IMPORTANT! We’re not going to create a new product here- we’re going to edit the pre-order product we created before. This is important because we’re going to use this same product to send a product update to previous buyers to fulfill their pre-orders.

On launch day you need to do two things, the first of which is to update your pre-order product in DPD to be the full version of the product, including the actual finished product file people should receive when they buy the product.

1. From the product list, edit your product
Edit your product

2. Edit your product name, price, and description to their regular, non-preorder values. This is what you want to display and sell the product for going forward now that the pre-order period is over.
Update product to non-preorder values

3. Once we edit our product we’ll be returned to its details page. From here we’re going to Add/Edit Purchase Actions and replace our pre-order message with the actual product file.
Change the preorder purchase actions

4. On the purchase actions page, we’re going to first delete the pre-order message by going to the menu for the deliver message action and selecting delete.
Delete the preorder message

5. Next, we’re going to add a Deliver File action so all future buyers will receive the product file. You can add as many product files as you like.
Add the actual product file

6. On the Deliver File setup page, upload your product file and configure any file specific options (PDF stamping, friendly name, etc.) that you like, then save.
Ready to go

Your released version of your product is now active on your website!

Because we didn’t create a new product and simply edited the pre-order product there is no need to update the button code on your website. What was once a pre-order product that delivered a thank you message is now a full product that delivers the actual product file.

The same product appears as the full version product in the cart:
Full version in the cart

And when someone buys it they will get the product file you uploaded above instead of the pre-order thank you message.

Full version after checkout with file

Last Step: Send Pre-Order Buyers the Released Product

The final step in the process is fulfilling all the pre-orders so those buyers can download the product file now that its released. To do that, we’re going to use DPD’s built in Send Product Update feature.

1. From the product list, click on the product’s Details link.
Product Details Link

2. On the product detail page scroll down and select “New Product Update Email” to begin the product update process.
Send a product update

3. On the send product update page, customize your email subject and body to let the pre-order customers know that this is their download link and their wait is over.
Create product update email

Note: Since in theory all buyers of the product before this date are pre-order customers, there is no need to manipulate the filters on the send product update page. Leaving the filters blank will send the updated file to all pre-order customers.

4. Preview the email and send. DPD will queue the product update email up for delivery and send it, usually within 20 minutes. Because of the potential for huge numbers of product update emails being sent at once, we queue these emails and send them in a metered fashion to prevent excessive load.

Your Pre-Order Buyers Now Have Their product!

When a product update is sent DPD re-evaluates the purchase actions that are assigned to the product. DPD will automatically see that the pre-order message has been removed and a file added, then update every pre-order customer’s purchase to reflect the new product file. This means that when they get their product update email and go to the download page they won’t see the pre-order message anymore; they’ll see the the download link instead!

All pre-order buyers will now receive your product update email with their own unique, activated download link to grab your product file.

Pre-order fulfillment email

When they follow the download link in the email, they’ll be taken to their personal download page to grab the file you released:

Pre-order fulfillment download page

Selling a pre-order product has quite a few steps, but none of them are complicated and they follow a logical process once you understand how DPD allows you to update existing products and then send those updates out to buyers. We’re basically creating a dummy product, letting people buy it, and then giving them the actual product file once its released. By using the same product, we make sure that all pre-order buyers (as well as all future buyers going forward) get the product file and any future updates you may make to the same product.

If anyone has any questions or needs any clarification on the process please drop us a line in the comments below or send us a support ticket- we’ll be glad to help!

DPD Now Supports Pin Payments for AU Vendors

  • Jason@DPD
  • November 4, 2013
  • 9 Comments

pin-logo-salesWe’re happy to announce that we now support Pin Payments for our customers in the AU.

Pin Payments allows you to seamlessly integrate payment processing into your DPD checkout. Pin Payments gives you the everything you need to accept card payments from your customers without forcing your customer to leave the DPD cart to go to a 3rd party hosted payment page- less friction, more conversions.

Pin pricing is currently 3% + 30c per transaction and there are no monthly fees, minimums, or hidden costs. Pin does payouts on a rolling 7 day schedule and is targeted at the Australian market.

Setup is extremely simple- just copy and paste your Live Secret API Key from your Pin account to DPD and save. That’s it!

Setting up Pin Payments with DPD

9/2/12 Denial of Service Attack Updates: Resolved and All Services Restored

  • Jason@DPD
  • September 2, 2013
  • 39 Comments

Our server is currently under a denial of service attack. This means that an attacker is flooding some of our IP addresses with garbage requests and preventing us from serving cart pages for legitimate requests.

The primary IPs affected include the *.dpdcart.com domain and service to the admin panel is not currently affected. However, because the dpdcart.com domain is affected this does affect adding products to the cart and checkout.

We are working with our datacenter to mitigate the attack, including installing network appliances designed to stop these types of attacks, and we hope to have service restored for everyone shortly.

We will be posting updates to Twitter and here as they happen.

10:40AM Update: Services are being restored now. Change should propagate over all affected IP addresses over the next few minutes.

12:30PM Update: A Cisco threat mitigation appliance has been installed and networks where the attack are originating from are being blocked. Some users who share these networks may be blocked also. This is unavoidable but blocking these networks allows the vast majority to get through.

4:30PM Update: Network traffic is returning to normal, but there are still a few networks and ISP that are being blocked due to the ongoing attack. We’ll continue to monitor and report our status, and a large majority of traffic is currently getting through.

7:30PM Update: Datacenter is reporting all traffic is back to normal and DDoS event is over (hopefully). Everyone should be able to access their cart and checkout.

7:32PM Update: DDoS’d again, twice as hard as before. We’re working on it.

10:30PM (EST) Update: Once again, traffic is starting to come through to the DPD Server. We’ve placed the server behind a threat management appliance so some networks where the distributed attack are originating will continue to be blocked, but for many locations carts will be accessible again.

We’re working with a 3rd party cloud provider to set up continuous DDoS protection by blocking the traffic before it reaches our server. We’ll be up all night getting this set up so we can get this behind us and return to full service for everyone.

We know this has been hard on everyone and we’re taking every step possible to restore service to everyone as soon as possible.

10:30AM Update: DPD is still being protected by the DDoS mitigation appliance and is serving requests to most traffic. The mitigation appliance is still blocking some networks where the ongoing attack is originating from, but most requests are coming through.

There was another attack spike this morning which was mitigated.

We’re still working with the cloud based DDoS protection provider to get our servers protected so we can get off the appliance, but its a very slow and complicated process. We’re working with their tech team to get it in action as soon as possible.

We’re working in rotating shifts to keep people on the job 24/7 during the attack.

6PM Update: New threat mitigation system in place, services are returning to normal for the cart domain. For full details please check your email or read online here: eepurl.com/EFUlX

Newsletters No Longer Available

  • Jason@DPD
  • August 30, 2013
  • 11 Comments

Effective immediately the newsletter feature is removed from DPD.

We added the ability for vendors to send newsletters to their customers several months ago because we thought it would be a swell feature for stores just starting out. Then we added the ability import customers, which made it SUPER EASY to use DPD to import an unlimited number of people and send bulk spam for the low, low price of $10/mo.

When you send spam through DPD our SMTP (outgoing mail) provider blacklists your domain. That means all the mail that DPD sends on behalf of you–including product activation emails to your customers, product updates, ship notifications for tangible goods–are also blacklisted and will not be sent.

When this happens we have no choice but to terminate your account because we can no longer provide the service for which you pay for.

Recently we’ve had to close a number of DPD accounts for Acceptable Use Policy violations in relation to spam. We don’t like being put in the position where we have to close an otherwise successful vendor’s account because of their marketing email practices so we’re removing the newsletter feature.

Vendors can also still send product updates for specific products. We want to make it very clear so there is no gray area though–this is not a marketing tool and we monitor the usage of the import customers and send product update features. Vendors who import large numbers of customers with the intent to send bulk unsolicited email using the product update feature will face immediate termination of their DPD account for AUP spam violations.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause some vendors, but we’re convinced this is the best move for DPD and our users going forward.

For new stores that want to set up a customer newsletter we highly recommend Mailchimp, which has a “Forever Free” plan for lists up to 2,000 subscribers and integrates seamlessly with DPD using our Mailchimp Integration.

DPD Update: Refunds from Inside DPD, Subscriber Custom Fields, and More

  • Jason@DPD
  • August 21, 2013
  • 2 Comments

This week’s DPD update brings an often requested feature and a number of performance improvements and small tweaks.

Refunds from inside DPD

Vendors can now process full or partial refunds for credit card and PayPal Express Checkout transactions directly from the purchase page in DPD. DPD supports refunds for the following processors:

  • Stripe
  • Authorize.net
  • SagePay
  • PayPal Website Payments Pro
  • PayPal Express Checkout

Note: For PayPal Standard, 2CO, and Payza/AlertPay you will need to perform refunds from their website. They don’t have a refund method that DPD can hook into to perform the refund from our interface.

To do a full or partial refund is easy:

1. Log in to your DPD account
2. Go to Purchases in the left menu
3. Find the purchase you want to refund and click it’s purchase ID to open the purchase page
4. Go to the Transaction Log portion of the page and for payments you’ll see a refund button as shown in this screenshot:

Refund Button on Transaction Log
Refund Button on Transaction Log

5. The refund page will open and auto-fill the refund amount with the purchase price. You can optionally change the amount of the refund (for a partial refund) and choose to mark the purchase as refunded.

You can adjust the refund amount on the refund page.
You can adjust the refund amount on the refund page.

Note: Setting the purchase to “refunded” on the download page will deactivate the download page and mark the purchase accordingly in your sales stats.

Other Improvements and Tweaks in this update:

  • Changed Inserting bulk coupons to prevent partial creation when the server encounters a problem.
  • Updated purchase download count tracking to work correctly with fulfillment based download (multiple files) and added a “view” button with the count to make it more apparent how to view download attempts
  • Tweaked uploader to provide more feedback to vendors when a file is complete uploading
  • Added a shipping state/province filter to the purchase list to aid in generating reports for sales tax purposes
  • Fixed aquaticprime key generation with non-ascii characters
  • Fixed deleted purchases appearing in the purchase csv.
  • Fixed a bug where the current uploaded file would count against your storage amount when replacing the file

Alternatives to using Coupons

  • Jason@DPD
  • August 13, 2013
  • No Comments

We came across an interesting article today titled The Coupon Code is a Slap In the Face that was decidedly anti-coupon code.

From the article:

You want to pay for this product or service. You were prepared to pay the advertised price; now you know there is (or has been) a magical passcode that could get you a lower price. You fire up Google, and search: “product name, coupon code.” You get pages of results: mostly garbage, some scams, and a few legitimate coupon sites. Unfortunately, the codes listed on those sites are a year old: you missed your chance.

Why do web apps and retailers do this to their paying customers? At the moment you’re actually ready to buy something you get a slap in the face: ”You’re paying full price, but if you had our magic code you wouldn’t have to.”

We’re Not Anti-Coupon if Thats What You’re In To

Hey, we don’t judge! Coupon codes are valuable promotional tools for some vendors. DPD supports coupon codes with some powerful targeting controls like dates they’re active, specific products required for them to be used, item and cart total requirements, and more.

However, we understand and appreciate the school of thought that coupon codes are in fact bad customer service, so we wanted to share with you some alternatives to using coupon codes for promotions.

The Coupon Field Can be Disabled

First off, if you don’t use coupons and don’t want users stopping checkout to go Google around and try to find a coupon code because they see a coupon field in your cart you can turn it off.

1. Log in to DPD
2. For the store you want to disable coupons for, go to Theme in the left menu
3. Edit your current theme and select the “Cart” page options
4. Uncheck the box to display the coupon field and save.

DTBQwFdD

That’s it! Remember though, if you decide to offer a coupon in the future you’ll need to go back to your theme and re-enable the field.

Alternate Price Points

As suggested in the article:

[Or] instead of coupon codes, they should have separate referrer URLs for people with the code so you don’t feel like the loser who didn’t get invited to the party.

DPD is set up to support alternate price points, and any product in DPD can have an unlimited number of alternate price points without using additional product slots.

Price Points are just what they sound like: different prices you charge for the same product. For example, you might sell your eBook for a regular price of $20.00. Instead of giving a 25% off coupon out, you could create an alternate price point of $15.00 and put it on your special offer landing page. People who buy from the $20 and the $15 price point are buying the same thing, they’re just paying different prices just like with a coupon. They’ll both go through the same checkout and get the same product with the same flow, no coupon required.

You can create a special landing page on your website for a promotion. Then, generate your DPD buy button using a special price point and place it on your landing page. Everyone who buys through that button will get the special price point it was created for.

You can use price points in other ways too. One of the most popular uses for alternate price points is for special offers to your email subscribers. You don’t even need to create a special landing page. Send a newsletter with a HTML or text link to the special price point and your subscribers can start checkout at the special price directly from the email.

Another popular marketing strategy is to make “Special Offers” to marketing related forums. You can easily generate a bbcode button and insert an alternate price point button in to a special offer post on a forum (we even provide pre-formatted BBCode!), paste the link in to a tweet or Facebook post.. just about anywhere you can paste a link you can post a special offer price point.

To create an Alternate Price Point:

1. Log in to DPD
2. Go to Products in the left menu
3. Find the product you want to create the price point for in the list and click it’s Details link
4. On the product detail page, find the price points section and click the “Create new Price Point” link

Add Price Points

5. Set your special price and name for this price point. The alternate price point name will be shown instead of the product name in the cart. This is great for if you want to title it “My Product – List Special Offer!” or similar to customize it further.

Two Price Points Listed

That’s it. You can now generate an “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button using the special price point:

Generate buttons using alternate price points

Here is an example of that special price point created above:

Add to Cart

Alternate price points are especially suited to limited time promotions because of their behavior when a price point is deleted. When a customer tries to buy using a special price that no longer exists, DPD will automatically revert them to the default product price. This means that when you’re done offering the special price you can safely just delete it–Even if the special price point link exists out there on the internet, people who try to buy from it after the promotion has ended will be offered the product at the regular default price.

Money Saving Bundles / Combos

New Bundle Menu OptionIn DPD bundle products are made up of other products. The great thing about bundles for promotion is that they can have their own price that is completely unrelated to the price of the products in the bundle.

For example, lets say you sell a program for $49.99 and two add-on themes for $19.99 each. The price of these together is $89.97. You could create a coupon that looks for that specific price and the base program before applying a discount, or you could just create a money saving bundle at a special price.

An example promotion might be “Buy the program and two themes for $67.50 and save 25%!” where you would create a bundle that contains all three products and set the price at $67.50.

Just like any other product in DPD, you can always create additional price points as outlined above for bundled products.

To create a bundle is easy: Just go to “New Bundle” in the left menu.

Or Just Lower Your Product’s Price for a While

If all this is a bit complicated you can just lower the price of your product in DPD. Edit your product, set the price lower, and save. When you’re ready to charge more, raise the price again.

Unlike PayPal buttons and other systems, With DPD you don’t have to regenerate the button code when you change the price–the buttons link to the product in DPD so whatever the current price is when the customer clicks it is what we’ll charge.

Want to sell for $10 for a few weeks instead of $20? Go ahead. You don’t need to update your website code. Ready to switch back? No problem; just log in to DPD and raise the price of the product. Everything will update automatically.

The Bottom Line

DPD supports coupons. We understand lots of people love to offer coupons, and we recognize their value to merchants who use our system.

We also understand that some people just hate them, so we’ve done our best to give you the most flexible promotion platform we can we alternate price points, bundles, and seamless price updates.

DPD Update: Dashboard Speed Improvements and Customer Requests

  • Jason@DPD
  • July 26, 2013
  • 2 Comments

Today we’ve released a minor update for DPD that addresses a few issues:

Dashboard Speed Improvements

We’ve changed the way we calculate, cache, and display the MTD, YTD, and lifetime stats in an effort to improve the load speed on the Dashboard. We are aware it was very slow for some vendors, so we’re doing our best to improve performance everyone.

If you had a slow dashboard before please let us know in the comments below or in a support ticket if the situation has improved, is worse, etc!

Customer Requests / Improvements:

  • We now record billing address country for all processors that provide it. You can get this data by exporting your Purchases lookup to CSV.
  • PDF watermarking now supports custom fields. For more information, see the PDF Stamping / Buyer Tracking KB entry.
  • Made a small change to the affiliate system to display 0 stats for months with no affiliate activity. Previously we didn’t display empty months at all.
  • Fixed a validation error when editing customer records
  • Prevented moving products from non-fulfillment stores to fulfillment stores since product records are not compatible.
  • Fixed broken DPD support email that was used in some system email templates from DPD to the vendor.

Getting Effective Support from DPD

  • Jason@DPD
  • July 10, 2013
  • 11 Comments

Hey! This is Jason from DPD. If you’ve ever done a support ticket with us more than likely we’ve exchanged emails as I tend to do most of the support related functions around here. I have hesitated to write this post for quite some time because I don’t want to offend vendors who contact us for support, and I worry that my tone or manner may come across as “angry support guy” when my intent is to help vendors get the support they need quickly. So, with that in mind, please read on!

Below are some tips to get better, more timely support from DPD.

If you have a DPD account, please log in before sending us a support request

Our support system will accept inquires from people who aren’t logged in to DPD. This is so we can take pre-sale questions from people who are asking about DPD before they create an account.

However, often times a vendor will send us a support ticket without being logged in to DPD and from an email address that is not associated with their DPD account at all. If your DPD email is bob@gmail.com and you send us a support ticket, without being logged in, from bob@hotmail.com we have no way to look up your account.

If we can’t look up your account we can’t access your stores, transactions, or any of the other information we need to properly provide you with support. If we can’t look you up, we have to reply and ask you what your login or DPD email is, wasting your time.

Speaking of email….

Make sure your DPD account has a valid email address

You guys have no idea how often we get a support ticket and reply in a timely fashion only to have it bounce back as undeliverable (because the email address doesn’t exist). This is typically followed up by 2-3 more angry tickets from the same bad email address wondering why we don’t respond to their previous request. It’s enough to make a poor support guy go crazy!

We totally understand that you might use a throw-away or fake email address to sign up for DPD because you don’t want spam. We hate spam too, which is why we never do it, ever.

Also, if you have an invalid email and you are subject to a DMCA takedown notice, virus scan warning (we scan everything on our servers and notify vendors) or other account issue and we can’t get in contact with you we have no choice but to suspend your account until you contact us. We can not risk the integrity of our servers or legal standing because of an invalid email address.

Please, use a real email. We’ll only use it to get in contact with you for support issues.

If you have an issue with a particular transaction or customer, give us the customer email or DPD purchase ID.

We often get emails like:

“A customer complained that they couldn’t download their product.”

DPD has thousands of vendors doing literally millions of dollars in transactions. We have absolutely no way of looking in to a customer or download issue if you don’t provide us with the customer’s email address they used during the purchase or (ideally) the DPD purchase ID for their purchase. Even if we can narrow it down to your account and the correct store, if you have more than one transaction we don’t know which one it is.

Not providing customer or transaction details just means we have to ask you, slowing down our investigation and resolution of the matter for you.

You can get the DPD Purchase ID from the Purchases list in the left menu after logging in- it’s the number beside every transaction.

If you have more than one store on your account and you have an issue, tell us which store we need to look at.

We often get requests that say “PayPal is not working on my store” only to check the account and see there are 10 stores, all using some variation of PayPal.

We don’t have any way of knowing which store is not working correctly so we have to reply and ask which one we should look at.

If a button is not working as you would like on your web page, give us the URL of the page with the button

We often get tickets like:

“The lightbox is not working on my page. Help…”

“DPD is broken on my website”

We don’t mind checking out your website to see what the problem might be (usually missing javascript or the button code is clipped when pasted) and we’d love to take a look and give you some guidance, but we need your web page URL to do so.

We do have a field during store setup for website URL, and if that is in there we can reference it. However, it’s an optional field because many people sell their products through ads, facebook, twitter, email campaigns, etc. and don’t have a sales website. Also, if you have many products or pages on your website it’s much faster for you to tell us the exact page we need to look at than for us to dig around on your website and guess which page you’re talking about.

The items above are generally the things we need to research your issue and help you with a solution. By providing the information in your support ticket you will save the back-and-forth time required when we have to ask you for more info.

Less back-and-forth means quicker resolutions to your problem!

New Product Feature Rolling Out: Multiple Fulfillment Based Delivery

  • Jason@DPD
  • July 10, 2013
  • 2 Comments

Fulfillment based product delivery is the future of DPD and what we will be migrating all stores and products to over the next 30 days.

What are Fulfillments?

Previously with DPD you picked a product type (download, key, service, tangible, etc.) and were locked to just that product type. With fulfillments, you’ll just select if a product is digital (no physical delivery) or tangible and then you can add as many fulfillment methods to the product as you like. This makes it possible to create products with multiple files, products with multiple files and a product key, a product with multiple files, a key, and delivery text (like service products), or any combination of the above.

So what does this mean for me?!

Well, thats a good question! Here are the big improvements for vendors with fulfillments:

  • You no longer need to use a combo and multiple product slots to deliver multiple files.
  • You no longer need to zip multiple files to deliver them all as one product. Of course, you still can if you want to!
  • When delivering multiple PDFs you can now stamp them all independently with different stamps. DPD will automatically display stamping options when you upload a PDF file
  • You can sell products, delivery page text, and keys all in the same product
  • When selling multiple MP3 files in the same product you can create preview players for each file

How do I get it?

Everyone will be upgraded to fulfillments over the next 30 days. All existing stores will be converted to fulfillment stores and have all the benefits of the new system applied to their existing products.

If you want to test or use fulfillments now you can create a new store. All new stores are already fulfillment enabled so go nuts!

We’ll be converting existing stores just as soon as we can. We’re going to do them in batches and review the conversions to make sure there are no issues so it will take us a bit, but it’s going to happen!

How does it work?

Instead of picking Download, Key, or service when creating a product you’ll now be presented with a simple choice:

Fulfillment Product Type Selection

Digital Product Type:

Allows you to deliver any combination of files (including multiple files), a product key, or delivery text (for instructions, a link to a support area, etc. only shown to paid customers) on the completion of a purchase

Tangible Product Type:

For selling physical goods that will be delivered. These collect shipping charges, have a place for you to put the tracking number to send to the customer after the sale, etc.

Bundle / Combo:

Products made up of other products, for example- MP3 Albums made up of other tracks that you also sell individually, value packs of multiple articles or books that you also sell individually, a digital version + tangible version combo, etc.

After you pick your product you’ll set the name, price, SKU, description, etc. as you always would:

Product Edit

And then you’ll be sent to the Manage Fulfillment Methods page where you can add any combination of the digital delivery methods:

fulfillment_list

You can add a key, delivery message, and as many files as you like, and you can drag and drop the fulfillment methods to reorder their display on the delivery page:

fulfillments-added

When the product is purchased, the delivery page will list each individual file, key, or text block as you have ordered it on your fulfillment list.

delivery-page-fulfillment

For file types that have specific options (MP3s, PDFs) those options are available per-file, so you can now create multiple mp3 previews (one for each file instead of one per product) and stamp each PDF in the product with different settings if desired.

Per file fulfillment options

You can also edit or add fulfillment methods to an existing product by going to the product’s details page from the DPD product list.

Product updates work as you would expect too- if you update a file or add a new file to a product, we’ll send the updated/new file(s) to your customers when you send a product update.

The Future

Fulfillments are a major architecture change with how DPD delivers products to your customers. They are an important first step toward many advanced features that we’re planning on adding and will now be possible due to this change.

Stay tuned for future updates!