We’ve started a new tutorial videos section here on the DPD blog that shows how to use DPD to do various tasks. Our first video, Setting up your First DPD Storefront, is available now with more to come soon!
You can view the Tutorial Videos Section by visiting the tutorial videos link at the top of the DPD Blog.
We’ve just published and update to DPD that incorporates the following new features, changes, and bug fixes as well as lays the groundwork for a couple major features coming soon. Please read on to learn whats new and coming up with DPD:
We’ve been running a beta of the localized checkout system with several vendors for the past few weeks and it’s now available to all. DPD Vendors can now select a default language for the shopping cart and/or instant checkout experience as well as the PayPal checkout process locale. Buyers will always have the option to override the displayed language if it is not in their native tongue.
All alternate languages have been professionally translated by a trusted 3rd party translation company.
This will allow vendors to create products and stores targeted at different countries and markets- For example, a US vendor can create a product or store targeted at the French market with the cart + all PayPal pages being presented in French, etc.
This is a storefront level setting for storefront products and a product level setting for instant checkout products.
Available languages include:
If you would like to see DPD in another language please make a request via support ticket. We’ll be adding more languages regularly based on your requests.
DPD vendors can now choose to collect an address for PayPal transactions. This is useful if you offer a download + physical delivery product. The address is stored and displayed both within PayPal and with the DPD transaction record inside DPD. This is our first step toward full physical product support that is in development.
This is a storefront level setting for storefront products and a product level setting for instant checkout products.
The available options for address collection include:
Vendors can now export customers from the Customer Center to a CSV compatible file for import in to other programs and services such as mailing list managers, accounting programs, and support systems.
We’ll be adding the export feature to the transaction look-up tool- Coming Soon™.
New File Uploader
A few weeks ago we switched to a new java based file uploader that can handle files up to 2GB in size. The new java based uploader is much more reliable and causes less issues than the old flash based uploader did for many people.
Better Download Limit Control
We’ve changed the download limit from a simple “Check here to limit to 2 attempts” to a drop-down with multiple options. Vendors can now give buyers more attempts to download the product before the download URL is disabled. As always, you can disable the download attempt limit and rely on only the download time limit function or vice-versa.
Free Download URL Display to the Vendor
When you send a free delivery of a product DPD will now also display the customer’s free download URL to the Vendor. In some instances the recipient failed to get the email from DPD’s servers due to their mail server settings or spam controls- now vendors can send the URL directly with their own personal message.
Minor Fixes and Tweaks
Google Checkout
In this update we made some “under the hood” changes to DPD code to prepare for adding Google Checkout as a payment processor. DPD is currently working toward Google Checkout certification as an advanced hosted shopping cart provider. Google Checkout is a great alternative to PayPal for US and UK vendors and we think you’ll like it a lot.
This feature is Coming Soon™.
PayPal Donation Support
We’re adding support for PayPal Donations with automatic product delivery. This will allow you to give a thank you gift to donors after they pay any amount or a set minimum. DPD will support “choose your own donation amount” as well as fixed amount donation buttons.
This feature is Coming Soon™.
We want to take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! This year has been great for DPD with hundreds of new vendors- we couldn’t have done it without each and every one of you. Thanks!
Due to the Christmas holiday we’ll have limited support staff on duty December 24-26. Please forgive us if non-critical service issues and general questions take longer to get answered during this holiday period- as I’m sure you will all understand we want our developers to have an opportunity to spend time with their families too.
We will have a developer on call throughout the holiday to monitor the DPD system and help vendors with critical issues, so we’ll make sure the buy buttons keep sending you money throughout the holiday 🙂
Once again, thank you all and Merry Christmas!
At approximately 4:30AM EST we needed to apply a security and system update to the DPD servers. When we must install critical updates to server software that has the possibility to disrupt services for vendors we always try to do it at our lowest traffic periods in the middle of the night to minimize the impact on users.
While this update was being installed a few users experienced difficulty logging in to their DPD accounts. We’re sorry about the inconvenience and full account access has been restored to all vendors.
Thank you for your understanding, and if there is anything we can do please don’t hesitate to submit a support ticket after logging in for priority support.
We’ve had numerous requests to make the cart and delivery pages of DPD multilingual to facilitate selling in non-English speaking countries.
Today we’ve published our first update to address multilingual checkout. Visitors to the storefront cart on your web page will now be presented with a language dropdown in the top right corner to change to their native language. The current language choices are English (default), Spanish, and French. This will change the cart language, currency display format, and delivery page language.
We’re not done though- we plan to add the following features to the multi-language checkout over the coming weeks:
If there is a language you would like to see DPD in that is not currently supported or planned please tell us about it- we’ll be adding languages based on your requests. This is by no means a complete feature and we plan to improve it over the coming weeks.
Several months ago we added the DPD Storefront system- our own twist on multi-item checkout. DPD Storefronts allow any DPD account to have an unlimited number of customized shopping carts, allowing you to use one DPD subscription to sell on many sites all with their own customizations.
However, this new Storefront system was not compatible with the legacy Standalone “Buy Now!” single product purchase buttons. This lead to being two separate product creation flows, two seperate product lists (Storefront and Standalone), and a lot of duplication. We always kinda hated that- it’s pretty confusing to new users. To correct it we’ve released a minor update to DPD that unifies the product lists and product creation process.
When DPD vendors log in to the Dashboard they’ll see a new set of options down the side- one “Create New Product” link and one “View Products” link:
The new Create Product page will now explain the two types of products and ask you which type of product you’d like to create:
And the new Product List page will show both your Storefront Products and your Instant Checkout Products:
You may have noticed from the screenshots that we’ve changed “Standalone Products” to “Instant Checkout Products” throughout. You see, developers see things differently from most people- we tend to name things by how they function or how they interface with the rest of what we’re doing, not what would make sense to a laymen or non-developer. I’m going to admit that calling instant “buy now!” products “Standalone” was probably one of those bonehead developer moves. Our bad.
Well, on the bright side we corrected it! Now Standalone Products are called Instant Checkout Products, i.e. “No cart- go straight to checkout with one item.” Hopefully this will make more sense to everyone.
We’ve just released a minor update to the DPD-Cart WordPress plugin that corrects a JSON error when the site hosting the WordPress blog was using an older PHP version.
DPD users can upgrade to DPD-Cart v1.2 automatically in their wp-admin or downloading the updated plugin from the WordPress.org DPD-Cart Plugin Page.
In order to provide expanded product storage space to DPD as well as provide for faster, more reliable downloads for vendors we’re in the process of moving product storage to Amazon S3, a distributed content delivery network.
Amazon “Simple Storage Service” (S3) is a highly scalable, reliable, fast data storage and content delivery network that uses the same infrastructure Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.
What does this mean for DPD Vendors?
We’re in the process of migrating batches of products to the S3 based delivery system by consumer demand and popularity. Over the next couple weeks we’ll continue to migrate all products over in a planned, staged roll-out and everyone will benefit from the enhanced reliability and speed of this new feature.
As always, if anyone has any questions or support issues the DPD developers are available to help- log in to DPD and submit a support ticket for 1-on-1 assistance.
We’ve updated the DPD-Cart plugin with a couple fixes and tweaks:
This is a recommended update for all DPD-Cart plugin users.
To update simply overwrite the dpd-wpcart plugin folder with the new version in the ZIP file. No configuration or template changes are needed.
Get the updated DPD-Cart v1.1 from the DPD-Cart Plugin Page
We’ve just released the DPD-Cart plugin for WordPress.
The DPD-Cart plugin allows you to easily integrate a DPD Storefront with your WordPress blog. It features a View Cart / Checkout sidebar Widget and easy product insertion in to posts and pages with no copying and pasting of button code.
Get the plugin and more details from the download page: DPD-Cart Plugin
Our friends at Inspired Mag have also created a tutorial with step-by-step instructions and screenshots showing how to get up and running with the DPD-Cart plugin.
Check out: Start Selling Downloads from your WordPress Blog in 5 Minutes