DPD Updates

We've released a change to the marketing opt-in feature based on vendor feedback we've received since the feature release this week. Now when marketing opt-in is disabled DPD will function like it always has in the past and will automatically send your customer data to 3rd party integrations. If marketing opt-in is enabled, it will honor the customer's input when sending data to 3rd party integrations. To break it down and make it easy to understand: Marketing Opt-In disabled: DPD will automatically send customer data to marketing integrations just like we've always done. Marketing Opt-In enabled, customer checks the box: DPD will send customer data to marketing integrations. Marketing Opt-In enabled, customer unchecks the box: DPD will NOT send customer data to marketing integrations. It is up to each vendor to decide if their marketing practices are compliant with GDPR- we're giving you the tools to do it how you...

This post has been updated on May 31 to address vendor feedback changes. In addition to our previous policy changes for GDPR, this morning we've released a new "marketing opt-in" feature that displays a checkbox on the cart during checkout. If checkout is completed with this box unchecked, your buyer will not be sent to marketing integrations configured on your store. In the Cart The field is displayed on the DPD cart under the name and email fields: On the Purchase Log Their opt-in status is displayed on the purchase detail page and in the purchase log: Setting up the Marketing Opt-In Field on your store From today forward, in compliance with GDPR regulations that go in to force tomorrow, the Marketing Opt-In feature is enabled on all DPD stores. This is a legal requirement of GDPR. You can disable it if you wish. To change the appearance of the...

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...

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...

I'm going to level with you guys: this update is pretty boring. Nothing here is of much consequence to the average user, so if you don't like reading stereo instructions then you can probably skip this one. Its full of boring back-end bug fixes and minor changes and one fairly boring interface change. Still, I'm going to blog about it so people know we're doing stuff behind the scenes! Fixed the dashboard graph so it's not wonky. There was a bug that made no-sales days not show up for some people. We fixed that. We also addressed some weird time zone issues where datapoints would show up on the wrong day due to the earth being round and everyone setting their clock differently. Dealt with silly, undocumented PayPal changes. We actually do this pretty often, but in this release there were some tweaks to the PayPal Standard code we use...