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:
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
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:
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:
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.
Early Tuesday morning Jacob’s wife gave birth to a beautiful and healthy baby boy. Jacob is one of the brilliant developers behind DPD and as one of the two original founders wrote most of the code that delivers your products each and every day.
Most of you never speak to Jacob, but thats not because he’s on vacation. As head of development for DPD he focuses on the technical aspects of the service and keeps everything running under the hood along with our newest partner, Scott. Rest assured though, if you’ve ever received a reply from me that read “One of the developers checked it out and fixed…” there’s a good chance he was the one that solved your problem.
He’s been my best friend for over 20 years and I’ve come to think of him as the brother I’ve never had. I have no doubt he will make a great father. Please join me in wishing him well while he works through his first days of being a new dad!
Would you like that a bit more blue?
How about making the fonts a nice shade of green? Want to scrap what we gave you and start from scratch? Now you can! DPD now supports full cart and delivery page customization for all 20 product or more plans. We have two different ways to do it for your customization pleasure: Basic color and the advanced full template customization.
To get started, go to the Look and Feel page of your website profile and open up a template editor:
Not so keen on the HTML and CSS? No problem- Go the easy route and pick 11 glorious colors to make the default template look a little more like your site.
For the artistic and technical types we offer full template customization so you can customize how your cart and delivery pages look down to the last pixel. This powerful method is not for the faint of heart, so be sure to check out the documentation before diving in here.
Whichever method you choose to customize your customer experience, we’re pretty sure you’ll never want to go back to stock. But if you happen to make your website a bit too purple and red, click on the revert link to start over.
New Feature Documentation: Cart and Delivery Page Customization
Collect Customer Info on Free Downloads
Tired of giving free downloads to random strangers? Now you can make them stand up and be counted. The “collect customer info” feature requires that anybody downloading your product gratis is required to give a name and an email address. Of course we’ll treat these downloads like any other purchase and ping you with the API and send your customer’s information on to your mailing list manager.
This is a per product option and all new products will default to “Collect Info On” for free checkout buttons and sales that result in a free checkout because of coupons.
You can also customize the collect customer info page template to your hearts content just like the cart and delivery pages!
What’s next? We’re not saying much but it rhymes with smaultiple squantities and stangible sgoods.
This morning we published an update that introduced an all new vendor control panel. This fluid, full width admin interface makes better use of widescreen monitors and higher resolution displays- something our server usage stats tell us that most vendors are moving toward. We’ve also made a couple usability improvements that we hope will make things easier to understand for everyone that uses DPD to sell downloads.
New Vendor Control Panel
The new vendor control panel is based on the 960gs system and is a fluid, full width template that uses 100% of your monitor instead of the bit in the middle. This gives us the ability to pack more information on a screen, reduces scrolling, and gives us lots of places to stick new features 🙂
Of note in the new admin interface is the side navigation- we’ve moved all commonly used vendor functions to the left sidebar for easy navigation from any page in the admin. We hope this will help people find everything they’re looking for a little easier.
Usability Improvements- “New Product Wizard”
As far as we know, DPD is the only download cart on the internet that allows users to set up multiple websites, each with their own customizations, on one account. Sadly, this also made DPD a little more complicated than other carts. To help correct this and make DPD easier to use for all, we’ve created a “New Product Wizard” that guides you step by step through picking the store you want to sell through, choosing your product type, uploading your product, and setting its features and options.
Vendors no longer have to go to the specific store they want to create a product under and hunt for a create product button- just click the “Add New Product” link in the new left nav menu for every new product- we explain the process along the way in plain english once you get started!
New Customization Option… Tomorrow
Tomorrow we’re adding a powerful new customization option that will let you completely control the look and feel of your cart and delivery pages. Check the blog tomorrow for the feature announcement and a link to the documentation for this powerful new feature!
As always, we value everyone’s feedback and we read every message you send us. If anyone has any questions, problems, or comments please log in to your DPD account and submit a ticket- we’ll get back with you ASAP!
We’ve decided that we’re going to start making semi-regular “DPD Featured Vendor” product and site review posts here on the DPD Blog for products and services that might be of interest to other DPD vendors.
This is good for a few reasons-
DPD Featured Vendors will have a free review posted on the DPD blog as well as a spotlight link in the DPD newsletter. This will be for DPD vendors only and the featured vendors will be picked by the DPD team.
Want to be a DPD Featured Vendor?
Drop us a line and tell us about your product. Make sure you include a link to your sales site where you have integrated DPD as your solution to sell downloads. If you want to offer a special deal to other DPD users and readers of this blog, let us know what you have in mind. We’ll go from there! We want to spotlight and review products that other DPD vendors could use.
Some good examples might be:
Things that probably wouldn’t make good featured products:
You can check out our first featured vendor post here: ProductShotPro Review
Today we published a small update that tweaked how a couple DPD features worked. None of these affect currently deployed DPD buy buttons or products already set up in the system.
Previously DPD would only work if a ClickBank sale initiated through a DPD generated buy button. DPD will now work with ClickBank if the sale initiates through either a DPD buy button OR a direct ClickBank link such as itemnumber.username.clickbank.net.
This should solve problems going forward with some users using pre-built scripts to power their ClickBank sales sites, and also sales that originate through 3rd party ClickBank directory type sites.
Also, ClickBank “thank you” pages provided by DPD now show a relevant error instead of the standard 404 error for dead pages when they are browsed to directly. The page will show an “active” status message when the product is set up and good to go. DPD generated “thank you” pages will only provide download links when part of a successful checkout through ClickBank.
This only affects new products being created from today forward. Previously created products are unchanged to prevent breaking already deployed buy buttons. If anyone wants the new functionality they are welcome to update their buy button code, but it is not required.
We’ve added POST vars for the contents of the cart checkout to the DPD IPN Notification URL system. These new additions include:
X = the item number in the checkout, i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.
For each item:
‘item_nameX‘ => The product name for this item
‘item_numberX‘ => The DPD product ID number for this item
‘quantityX‘ => The quantity of this item sold. Typically “1”
‘mc_gross_X‘ => The product price for this item
‘mc_currency_X‘ => The price currency for this item
‘skuX‘ => The SKU / Stock number for this item
‘product_keyX‘ => If a product key was delivered through DPD’s new keycode delivery system for this item, it will be included here.
These are all the same as PayPal IPN POST vars, so they should be very close to compatible with any 3rd party services or scripts designed for PayPal or the PayPal IPN system.
We’ve been working with MailChimp to get our services hooked up and I’m pleased to announce that DPD integration with MailChimp is now live!
Now you can pass customer data from any website profile directly to MailChimp automatically. DPD supports Name, Email, and Address data to be passed and automatically included in your lists (if your list has address fields).
We use MailChimp here at DPD for our infrequent customer newsletters and we think they’re the best around. Their service is outstanding, their support people are great, and from our integration experience with them I can tell you first hand that it’s run by a great group of people.
MailChimp offers THE best list management tool on the planet. They support autoresponders and signup forms and have an active user and developer community to help you get going. We really can’t say enough good things about MailChimp here at DPD- we’re feelin’ the “Chimp Love”.
We’ve written a simple guide on Integrating DPD with MailChimp to get you started fast. If you don’t already have a MailChimp account and want to foster better communication with your buyers, go get one. Mailchimp is totally free for lists below 500 subscribers! You’ll be amazed by all the powerful email marketing features.
This uses the brand-spankin’-new Notification URL feature that we deployed yesterday. Now that we have a common notification URL set up we’ll be working to integrate DPD with more and more services and products- if anyone has a special request post it to our feedback forum and if we get enough users asking we’ll do our best to get it hooked up!
PS- If you can’t tell we really, really like MailChimp.
We’ve released a couple new features: purchase notifications (IPNs) and keycode retrieval.
Purchase Notifications
DPD now supports sending purchase notifications to a URL of your choice. We send most of the same fields that PayPal sends in their IPN plus a few fields that are specific to our service. Hop on over to the documentation to learn more.
We’re pretty excited about this feature. It opens up DPD for tighter integration into 3rd party services. We’ll be announcing an integration later this week.
Keycode Retrieval
Hot on the heels of last week’s keycode release we’ve added a branded keycode retrieval page. Link to this page from your website and your customers can retrieve their purchased keycodes without asking you for help. Grab the URL from the “Website Tools” link under your website on your product list. We’d love to hear your feedback on this feature.
Fixes and Tweaks
– The DPD Team