DPD Updates

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...

In this update we've added a couple often requested features and added improvements to several areas of DPD. Manual Purchase Creation Vendors have asked for a way to create a purchase in DPD so that their offline sales, mail order sales, etc. can be accurately reflected in DPD and so they can send product updates to buyers who purchased through other channels. We've added a manual purchase creation page where you can build a purchase using existing products or a blank line item (useful for adding a service or other arbitrary charge), billing and shipping information, etc. Manual purchases will not charge the customer, but they will be reflected in your DPD sales stats and reports. To create a manual purchase, go to the purchases page and click the Create button in the top right corner of the page. Edit Existing Purchases We've added the ability to edit the billing...

Zapier is a tool for non-technical people to easily connect together web apps. Zapier has both free and paid plans based on the number of integrations you set up and the frequency that they’re checked for updates. What can you do with Zapier and DPD? Zapier supports over 700 popular CRM, Accounting, communication, and task management tools. You can pass your customer and sales data to any one of these apps using an easy point and click interface, harnessing the power of the DPD API without having to write a single line of code. Some examples of what you can do with DPD and Zapier We've created a few pre-configuered shared Zaps based on what vendors often request integration with: But thats not all you can do with DPD and Zapier! DPD can connect and share sales data with any of the 700+ supported apps using custom setups you create...

In this update we've added two new often requested features and several bug fixes. Test Credit Card Processor We've often been asked for a test credit card processor so vendors can privately test their products and stores. In response, we've added a test credit card processor, available under Payment Methods in the left menu, that you can activate to complete test checkouts. When the test card processor is activated it automatically generates and displays a unique card number to be used for testing checkout. This is the only card number that will work with your store. This is to prevent random people from using published test card numbers from Visa, Mastercard, etc. to get your products for free. We place warnings all over the DPD admin and cart when the test processor is active. Obviously, it goes without saying that when a test processor is active you won't collect any...

We've just released a completely redesigned product edit page that greatly reduces the length of the form and adds modern features like drag-and-drop image uploading. Some highlights of the new product edit form: Drag-and-Drop image upload. Simply drag your image to the image area, or click to open a standard file dialog to select your image. The form now puts the most crucial fields required to configure the product at the top of the page. Optional features are now collapsed at the bottom of the form, including the EULA feature and Upsell feature. One click expands these options for editing and they're automatically expanded if previously configured for the product. There is a new sidebar product status / save box that is always with you on the page- no more scrolling to find the save button New Product Visibility Setting The new product visibility option replaces "show on cart index":...

We're happy to announce our new beta app for Zapier that allows you to pass your DPD sales data to the 500+ apps that Zapier supports. Zapier is a 3rd party service that serves as a "middleman" and connects web apps using an easy point and click interface. Zapier has both free and paid plans based on the number of integrations you set up and the frequency that they're checked for updates. Because this is a new app and in beta you'll need to follow the link below to add the DPD app to your Zapier account: Add DPD App to Zapier What can you do with Zapier and DPD? Zapier supports over 500 popular CRM, Accounting, communication, and task management tools. You can pass your customer and sales data to any one of these apps using an easy point and click interface, harnessing the power of the DPD API...