Today we’re happy to announce the newest version of the DPD cart and checkout. The new v3 version of our cart and checkout is now fully responsive for mobile devices, includes a slick one page checkout, and features new hosted product pages in addition to the cart index.

The New Cart

The new and improved Version 3 cart and checkout brings with it several changes that we think you will love:

Responsive Cart Design. v3 blends a flat, modern look, with responsive design to make your store look great on all devices, big and small.

For the developers and designers out there, we based the new cart on Bootstrap 3‘s responsive grid system so it should be easy to customize.

One Page Checkout. DPD checkout now takes place on one page, with DPD loading whatever forms it needs (shipping, tax, etc.) based on what is in the cart. Where checkouts would previously be up to three pages they are now a single dynamic page. We’ve significantly shortened the conversion funnel for vendors which is proven to lead to more checkout completions.

More Languages. We’ve added 20 more languages to the DPD checkout! We’ve also made it easier to update translations in the future.

Hosted Product Pages

While you still have the option of adding our add-to-cart buttons to your website, DPD now provides hosted product pages that you can link to directly from your website, app, or even ads and forum posts. The hosted product pages use that mysterious “Long Description” field from product setup that we said we’d use in the future.

New Responsive Email Templates

To match our new responsive cart we’ve also updated our email templates to a new responsive design.

If you’ve already customized your emails we didn’t overwrite them- you can get the updated responsive emails by clicking the “Switch to Default” link on any email editor page.

How to upgrade

All new stores will automatically be v3-enabled. Existing stores only take a couple of clicks. Please take a look at our KB article that guides you through the steps.

Upgrade to DPD’s Responsive v3 Cart

We’ve worked hard to make this cart great. Please let us know what you think!

Coming soon!

We have a lot planned for 2015. Already in development we have session based download controls, a hosted ebook reader to help prevent sharing, Buy Now Widgets, pay-what-you-want products, and the return of subscriptions among several other changes.

Tonight we will be applying required security and stability updates to our primary web servers. This even will require a server restart and will result in a brief period of downtime for all DPD users while the servers reboot and come online.

This means that some or all DPD stores and the DPD admin will be offline during the maintenance period while software is updated.

We are going to be performing this maintenance at 11:00 PM ET and expect it to last less than 30 minutes.

See what time this is in your time zone here.

Planned maintenance events like these are rare but important to ensure the stability and safety of DPD. We generally only perform these a couple times a year or when a critical security vulnerability is found in software running on the machines, so we thank you for your patience and understanding.

We’ve just released several small tweaks to our EU-VAT 2015 support, new invoice, and admin:

EU-VAT 2015 Custom Rates

You can now enter your own country specific rates for EU-VAT countries that override the default rate. While the default published rates will work for most people, there are some special classes of product in some countries that have a non-standard rate. You can now enter the optional rate in the VAT tax integration.

Invoice Tweaks:

Based on feedback on our new invoice format, we’ve done the following:

• Compacted the layout so that it prints on one page. Note: Adding extra text to the invoice, or invoices with many items may force it to print on more than 1 page.
• Fixed store logo on invoices where it wasn’t displaying in some cases
• Added invoice option to disaply custom fields
• Added invoice.css to theme assets so you can customize the invoice CSS to your liking

Added Country Blacklist Rules:

For vendors who want to restrict sale of their products from specific countries you can now create Country blacklist rules by going to Blacklist in the left menu, adding a new rule, and selecting the country.

The country blacklist works on GeoIP lookup using the buyer’s IP address.

Vendors can also always edit their Supported Countries under Shipping to remove countries they do not want to allow sale to from the shipping address country selector.

We’re making a lot of EU-VAT related changes here at the end of the year and updates will be rolling out over the next couple days in preparation for the Jan 1st deadline. Here are the current changes:

New EU-VAT 2015 Module Released:

This weekend we released the new EU-VAT 2015 tax module.

You can now configure your stores for the 2015 EU-VAT changes by following the instructions in this updated KB article:

http://support.getdpd.com/hc/en-us/articles/202925499-EU-VAT-2015-

EU-VAT changes that are being released in the next few days:

• Set your own EU-VAT 2015 rate per tax class (we’ll provide the default country rates, you can override them if you sell a special class of item)
• We’re going to record the tax class and update the reporting to show rate charged by tax class (for when you set a non-standard rate as above).
• Expanding the reporting after the 1st. This is non-critical for the 1st since reports are due quarterly, but we’ll get it in there in the next week or so.

Tax Advice:

We have had a flood of tickets asking us for tax advice. I’m sorry, but we’re not tax professionals and we are not qualified to give you tax advice. We strongly encourage you to speak to your accountant or tax professional for advice on if you need to collect EU-VAT.

Specifically, we have been asked by numerous US vendors who have no tax nexus in the EU if they have to collect VAT for EU sales. This has prompted a number of US vendors to ask for the option to disable EU sales completely. We strongly suggest you speak to your accountant or tax professional on if this is a wise decision and the enforceability of EU tax law on non-EU countries.

• Based on the feedback we’re getting in tickets, we will be implementing the blocking of sales to EU countries. However, this is a large project and it may not be released by the 1st.

New Invoice Template:

As part of the EU-VAT 2015 changes and as a general upgrade to all DPD stores we have implemented a new invoice template based on Bootstrap 3 for responsiveness and print layout for all stores running the current cart version. This new invoice includes all sales data collected by default. It also includes the required EU-VAT 2015 data.

The invoice is now a set template that that includes everything a vendor has ever asked us to include on the template- literally everything from the purchase. There are the standard above / below text areas like every other page of the cart so you can add custom text.

We have already received some feedback on the new invoice. Some of it is good, some bad.

We are going to make the following changes to the invoice over the next few days based on that feedback:

• Make custom field responses shown on the invoice optional (Theme -> Invoice Page Option checkbox)
• Compact the layout a bit to keep it printing on one page
• Show store name or logo correctly at the top of the invoice. This is bug that is being corrected ASAP.
• Add an invoice-custom.css to the theme assets for advanced customization if desired.

EU VAT laws are changing for electronic service, or ‘e-service’, providers. Today, in line with existing EU VAT rules, the VAT on e-services is charged based on the location of the merchant but, from 01 January 2015, the VAT on e-services must be calculated based on the end customer’s location.

Changes to DPD and your Sales Process

There are a number of changes that vendors have to make:

• Identify the location of their customers and collect evidence
• Validate VAT numbers for B2B transactions
• Apply the correct VAT rate and display it on invoices in destination currency
• Issue e-invoices in the destination language
• Store evidence for 10 years
• Create a quarterly EU MOSS return
• Be audit ready

We have been busy making changes to DPD to meet the new 2015 EU-VAT regulations. These changes will be available as a new 2015 EU VAT tax class available in the tax setup section of your DPD store prior to Jan 1st 2015.

Identify the location of their customers and collect evidence

DPD already collects the shipping address for the customer and IP address and stores them with the transaction in DPD. This meets VAT location identification requirements.

Validate VAT numbers for B2B transactions

DPD verifies that VAT IDs are valid using VIES when they are entered in the cart.

Apply the correct VAT rate and display it on invoices in destination currency

DPD is changing our VAT rate calculations to meet the new destination based 2015 rules. These rules can be summed up as:

• Same zone, with VAT ID = Buyer charged VAT
• Same zone, without VAT ID = Buyer charged VAT
• Different zone, with VAT ID = No VAT charged
• Different zone, without VAT ID = Destination VAT charged
• non-EU = No VAT charged.

We will be doing automatic currency conversion, using Open Exchange Rates for the VAT amount charged at the time of sale to put the VAT amount charged in the destination country’s currency.

Issue e-invoices in the destination language

DPD has completely rewritten the invoice template to include all required information including seller and buyer address and VAT info. We have translated the entire invoice to the 26 languages commonly in use in the EU.

Store evidence for 10 years, Create a quarterly EU MOSS return, Be audit ready

We have made it easy, through a new VAT Report view to export what VAT you have charged for each country. We have also made the above changes to the invoices so that you can print them out and store a record of the transactions to meet any and all record keeping requirements.

DPD will keep your transactions for as long as you are a customer, but we are not a long-term data storage provider. You should always keep a record of your transactions for record keeping and audit compliance reasons.

How to set up the 2015 EU-VAT Rules in DPD

On Jan 1st you will need to switch your stores over to using the new 2015 EU-VAT Tax Rules.

1. Log in to DPD
2. Go to Preferences in the left menu for each store and enter your VAT ID and location information, then save.
2. Go to Tax in the left menu for each store
3. Edit each tax class and remove any old “VAT” or “EU-VAT” rules from your existing table rate tax classes, then save
4. Enable the new 2015 EU-VAT tax rules for each tax class.

Last night we added a couple often requested features and released several bug fixes and tweaks.

Customer Merge Function

DPD vendors can now merge customers in to one customer record. Previously, you were unable to change a customer’s email address (which is how they’re identified in our system) with another customer. Now if you try to change a customer’s email to one that already exists we’ll ask you if you want to merge the customer records:

New Free Purchase Email Template

We’ve added a new template to free purchases, including products with a 0 price, “send free download” products, and sales that result in a 0 total after discounts/coupons.

You can customize this email independently of your paid thank you email template. We have gone ahead and copied your paid email template to your free email template so if you’ve already customized your paid email it will still be sent to free purchases instead of the default template.

This is so you can format free purchases and giveaways differently from paid purchase thank you emails, if desired.

Other Fixes and Tweaks in this update:

• Fixed the profile PayPal email not being used for affiliate MassPay files in some cases. Now DPD will use the profile PayPal email if it exists, and the account email if it does not.
• Fixed refund status for partial PayPal refunds. DPD will not mark the purchase as refunded and disable download for partial refunds now.
• Fixed state/province not persisting on cart shipping form error.
• Additional logging for purchases to aid in management and customer support investigation. Additional logging can be seen in the purchase log on each purchase page.
• Fixed cart sale notices not being sent to the correct address in some instances.
• Fixed cloning (copying) a product with non-latin letters in its name.
• Added shipping_street2 merge var to the default invoice. If it exists it will be shown, if not the merge var is hidden.
• Made available custom field response merge vars to purchase email templates. You can now use { custom_x } using your custom field IDs to merge them.
• Updated spanish cart translations with help of a native speaker vendor.
• Added “Capture” to the list of refundable actions.
• Fixed the display of processor fees for Stripe that were disabled in the last update (oops!)

DPD’s primary servers are located in the Softlayer Washington, DC Datacenter. At approximately 1:30PM they had a fiber optic cable damaged that resulted in 6 minutes of downtime. As they are completing repairs there has been poor network performance connecting to the DPD servers. This impacts all DPD services including mail, product downloads, and the vendor admin.

Status updates are being posted to the two primary Softlayer twitter accounts:

https://twitter.com/SoftLayerNotify
https://twitter.com/SoftLayer

Aug 26, 2014 1:26 PM EST: 6 minutes of downtime when fiber cable was cut. Because of the short downtime period, this was not a critical event.

Aug 26, 2014 1:32 PM EST: All DPD services restored. Our server and data were not affected- this is a network issue with the cables between data centers.

Ongoing: Softlayer Update: “Until WDC01 redundant links are completely restored, customers may experience higher than normal network latency and some packet loss.”

DPD posted a notice in the DPD admin and company twitter accounts.

Aug 26, 2014 4:00 PM EST: Softlayer Update: “Fiber crews are replacing the severed network link between WDC01 and WDC02. This work is expected to take several hours to complete.”

Aug 26, 2014 10:31 PM: Softlayer Update: “The crews encountered difficulty in pulling the cable through the conduit, so the repair has not been completed yet.”

Aug 27, 2014 1:00 AM: Performance seems to be improving. There is no Softlayer update at this time but we are monitoring network traffic to the DPD servers and throughput is rising.

Aug 27, 2014 10:45 AM: Softlayer announced that the repairs were completed. We’re still experiencing latency issues and we’re working with the provider to address them.

Aug 27, 2014 12:38 AM: All network issues are resolved.

Summary:

1. A major fiber optic interconnect was severed at the SoftLayer datacenter in Washington, DC where DPD’s primary servers are located. This resulted in a 6 minute period of downtime while switching to backup lines.

2. While SoftLayer was repairing the severed line, all DPD traffic was moving over backup lines that struggled with the capacity, leading to poor DPD performance for about 23 hours.

3. The line was fixed. After several hours the traffic was returning to correct levels as it was re-routed back to the primary lines and bottlenecks were addressed.

Total time on error was 6 minutes.

Total time for degraded performance was 23.5 hours.