DPD Updates

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...

Today we released an update that changes the way we charge credit card transactions to prevent double submits of payment information resulting in double charges. Authorize + Capture Flow for Credit Card Transactions This change is somewhat technical and should be invisible to buyers but will address an important support issue affecting credit card users. DPD has always used javascript to prevent double submits of the payment form in the DPD cart. However, recently there have been more and more timeouts when submitting charges to mainly Paypal Payments Pro where their site would fail to load (outside of DPD's control), the buyer would give up and reload the page defeating any javascript we could do, and submit a duplicate charge. The change released today now splits Authorize (to see if the funds are available) and capture (to actually charge the card) in to two separate transactions. This lets us double-check...

Today we released a new purchase action that allows you to deliver a file from your own S3 bucket. This is an often requested feature for advanced users only. This is an advanced feature that will cost you money. Have no illusions about this feature– Its complicated to set up, requires that you generate and enter your AWS credentials and file URLs, and will cost you money in addition to your DPD monthly fee. This is only for advanced users only. You are responsible for all storage and bandwidth/delivery fees incurred through Amazon S3 for files delivered from your S3 account. The vast majority of users will use DPD's built in file storage and delivery by using a simple "Deliver File.." action. This uses the storage space included with your DPD plan and does not charge any additional fees for storage or bandwidth. With a deliver file action all you...

In this update we made an improvement to the DPD affiliate system as well as added a couple features to the admin that vendors have been requesting. Per-Product Affiliate Links You can now enter a product URL on Product -> Edit and we'll provide a per-product hoplink to your affiliates that leads to that URL in their affiliate control panel. To give your affiliates per-product hoplinks: 1. Log in to DPD 2. Go to Products in the left menu to open your product list 3. Edit the product you want to add a product URL to 4. Enter the product's full URL in the field provided and save. Your affiliates will see, below the website hoplinks, any product specific hoplinks you have configured: A Word about the affiliate system in DPD We know that there are many features that need to be added to the affiliate system in DPD to...

We have completed our maintenance event and upgraded primary hardware. We published a time of 2 hours to be on the safe side, but the total time this impacted access to the DPD site was just 36 minutes. We generally only have a hardware event like this every other year or so to upgrade critical hardware and keep things current. All vendors should experience performance improvements throughout the DPD admin.

Sunday Jun 29, 10:00 PM EDT / 2:00 AM GMT. Starting at 10:00 PM EDT (2:00AM GST) on Sunday, June 29th we will be performing a critical infrastructure upgrade to DPD servers. This upgrade, which will involve moving a critical database and web server, will result in up to 2 hours (hopefully less!) of downtime for some or all vendors during the move. See what time 10:00 EDT is in your time zone 10:00PM EDT is historically our lowest traffic time across the entire platform so this upgrade will impact the minimum of customers. Vendors can expect the DPD admin, their shopping carts, and products to be unavailable during some or all of this time. We will have all staff on hand during this upgrade and we will complete it as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause, but this critical upgrade must be made to...

Today we released a completely new Google Analytics: Universal Analytics integration for all-in-one tracking of your entire sales process and checkout flow with DPD. The new integration replaces the old Google Analytics eCommerce integration and manually placing code in the Tracking HTML field of your store preferences. The old Analytics Ecommerce integration should be disabled and all Analytics tracking code removed from the Tracking HTML field under store Preferences for accurate tracking results. The new Universal Analytics integration is available for all v2 stores in DPD under the Integrations menu. Note: Uses Universal Analytics This integration uses Universal Analytics using analytics.js, not the old "classic" analytics javascript. The new Universal Analytics updates faster, tracks better, and loads faster on your website. If you are using Classic analytics code on your website you must update your tracking code to use this new integration. New code is provided by the integration for...

Today we released an update to our coupon module that makes it easier to browse and manage coupons, especially when you have created many single use coupon or discount codes. Coupon List Improvements The coupon list now features a more compact table that lists more coupons at once and includes filters so you view specific coupon status, or a specific coupon name. Color Coded Coupon Display We have also color coded the coupon display to show inactive coupons as red and future coupons (which are not yet active but aren't technically "inactive") as yellow. We hope being able to see at a glance the status of a coupon by its color will make it easier to understand what is going on with a specific code (and stop vendors from having to email us asking why their future coupon shows as "inactive" like an expired coupon). Bulk Edit Coupon Status and...

This weekend we released an update to our Reports module that adds several new report formats and greatly expands DPD's sales reporting capabilities. All reports can be exported to CSV for offline manipulation in Excel, your own accounting program, etc. You can access these reports using the Reports link in the left menu, then selecting which report you would like to view from the list. In addition to the Purchases and Customer lists that are filterable, we have now added the following table-based reports: Sales Report The new sales report lets you generate a table showing your sales between specific date ranges, grouped by date, week, or month. You can also show specific order statuses, so you could generate a refund report, etc. Using the cross-linked columns you can drill down for each item to view the purchases for the time period or the products that were purchased in that...