DPD Updates

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...

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...

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...

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...

This weekend we released a major update to the PDF stamping system as well as tweaked a few settings for vendors. PDF Stamper - Faster, Leaner, use Any PDF Version We have upgraded our PDF Stamping / Buyer Tracking system to be faster and use less memory on our server for each stamp operation. This means we can reliably stamp larger PDF files than our previously published 30MB recommendation. Our new recommended maximum file size is 75MB. If your file is larger please test to make sure we can open and stamp your PDF. We have also improved our PDF version support- we now support any PDF version, although you should always test advanced features added to PDFs (Reader Extended, Forms) before offering your product to the public. We do our best to support everything, but due to the million different combinations of features its hard to guarantee compatibility with...

We're happy to announce that this morning we released another often requested feature- group support for Mailchimp integrations. As always, vendors can select which mailing list they want to send buyers from a store to. Now, you can also optionally specify group options for subscribers based on store or product. Store Group If you want to use the same mailing list across multiple stores, DPD now lets you put all purchases from a specific store into a Mailchimp group. By using a store group you'll be able to segment sending to your list shared across multiple stores by the store they purchased from. Product Groups We've also added the ability to assign a group to the purchase of specific products. This will allow you to laser focus your campaigns to a specific product or products purchased. Using Mailchimp Groups with DPD: 1. Set up your groups in Mailchimp. 2. Log...

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...

The fine folks at Drip, an email marketing automation company, have written integration instructions for DPD using our notification URL feature. Now without writing a line of code you can now trigger almost any action in Drip when someone makes a purchase through DPD. What makes Drip special? From Drip's website: Most email service providers (ESPs) are built to send email newsletters to a static list of subscribers. Drip can do this as well, but our main differentiation from traditional ESPs is our email automation. This makes it dead simple to move people into and out of multiple autoresponder sequences based on things they do: click certain links, open certain emails, express interest in a topic, etc… Drip is not focused solely on a specific phase of email sending such as marketing or customer retention. We have invested heavily to support the following five stages of email sending: marketing, lead...

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...