DPD Update: PDF Stamping Improvements, Better Key Management, Minor Tweaks

  • Jason@DPD
  • September 29, 2014
  • 1 Comment

This weekend we released a major update to the PDF stamping system as well as tweaked a few settings for vendors.

PDF Stamper – Faster, Leaner, use Any PDF Version

We have upgraded our PDF Stamping / Buyer Tracking system to be faster and use less memory on our server for each stamp operation. This means we can reliably stamp larger PDF files than our previously published 30MB recommendation. Our new recommended maximum file size is 75MB. If your file is larger please test to make sure we can open and stamp your PDF.

We have also improved our PDF version support- we now support any PDF version, although you should always test advanced features added to PDFs (Reader Extended, Forms) before offering your product to the public. We do our best to support everything, but due to the million different combinations of features its hard to guarantee compatibility with every PDF.

Always preview your PDF or send yourself a free download before offering your product to the public! If the preview link on the setup page doesn’t load the PDF correctly then your PDF can’t be opened or stamped for some reason. Consult the KB for PDF stamping or send us a support request to take a look.

As always, to stamp a PDF we need an unencrypted (unsecured) PDF uploaded to DPD. You can optionally encrypt the PDF after stamping in our system if you must delver them encrypted. You should be aware though- most mobile devices can not open encrypted PDFs.

Other tweaks and improvements:

  • Upgraded the manage key codes page to allow for selecting and deleting multiple keys at once.
  • Updated DKK currency to DKr
  • Added ability to force shipping address collection even if products or tax/shipping rules do not require it.
  • Tweaked Google Analytics integration to properly track purchases that go to pending (such as e-check payments) instead of being activated immediately.
  • Other small backend improvements to speed and deployment performance
  • Added #support-message ID to the support message on the delivery page so it can be hidden or styled with your theme’s custom.css

New DPD Features: TGIF Edition!

  • Jason@DPD
  • September 10, 2010
  • 2 Comments

It’s been a long week at DPD HQ and we’re happy to announce our intrepid developers got out of bed at 6AM to publish a special TGIF update that brings a number of new features that vendors have been asking for:

Tangible Goods

DPD now supports the sale of simple tangible goods along side your downloadable products.

Tangible goods are anything that needs to be delivered. So you’re no longer limited to digital files and product codes with DPD. Sell physical copies of your products like CDs or DVDs. Sell company memorabilia like coffee mugs, yoga mats, bobble heads, t-shirts or stationary. Sell lawn furniture, or your custom replicas of Yoda’s gimmer stick.* If you have something to sell, DPD can help you sell it.

Our focus will always be on digital product delivery (It is our name after all), but we wanted to accommodate those vendors who might want to sell a boxed or printed product along side their digital delivery in the same cart.

Along with tangible goods support, we’ve upgraded the purchase tracking system to handle the stuff unique to physical products. DPD now also has:

  • Shipping Cost Support
  • Tax Support
  • Inventory Tracking
  • Invoices
  • Updated Purchases List with Status Icons and Color Coded rows for easy order management

Learn More: Tangible Goods Documentation

Quantities

An often requested feature was the ability to sell multiple quantities of downloadable products for people that wanted to sell multiple software or usage licenses, etc. You can now enable the sale of multiple quantities when configuring a product.

The customer will still get one download button with multiple quantities (as downloading the same thing more than once is just silly), but if they purchase more than one their receipt will show the quantity purchased. Also, if it is a product with keycodes, DPD will automatically deliver the number of keys purchased (so if they bought a quantity of 3, they’ll get 3 keys).

Selling multiple quantities defaults to off for digital products and on for tangible goods.

Learn More: Selling Multiple Quantities of Products

Automated FTP Mass Upload

DPD has always offered FTP as a product file upload method, but it was a manual operation and you had to contact support for an account, wait for us to attach your file to your product, etc. That was a major pain in the butt for everyone, so we’ve made it completely automated.

On the product file upload page you’ll find FTP upload instructions for connecting to your own personal DPD FTP account. Once you upload your products, they’ll magically appear in DPD so you can attach them to your products without any need for contacting support!

This will also be handy if you have a bunch of products to set up- just queue them up in your FTP program and walk away- they’ll upload while you’re doing other things and when they’re done you can come back attach the product files to your products. We think you’ll really like this feature for the time savings.

Learn More: Mass Upload Your Products with FTP

PDF Buyer Tracking Update

We’ve improved one of DPD’s most popular features- PDF Buyer Tracking. Vendors can now customize how their PDFs are stamped with buyer information:

  • Tracking Format allows you to customize the text that is displayed in your watermark. Merge variables allow you to specify where the purchase information goes.
  • Tracking Page Limit will allow you to chose how many pages, starting from the first page, to apply the watermark. This is great for documents that are intended to be printed, but without a watermark.
  • Font Color lets you choose the color of the watermark so it stands out or blends in with the background.

Learn More: PDF Buyer Tracking Feature Information

Thats about it for this update. We’re all going to head to the bar for some recreational binge drinking, so hopefully nothing broke.

Just kidding!
We’ll be standing by if anyone has an problems like always- to get some help with anything log in to your DPD account and submit a support ticket– we’re here if you need us!

*One of the developers wrote this. What can I say, developers are pretty nerdy sometimes.