We’ve just released another update (two days in a row!) that adds some much requested options to the extremely popular PDF Stamping / Buyer Tracking feature.
Vendors can now:
Enable or Disable Stamping / Buyer Tracking on PDF products
Customize the stamp text using available merge vars outlined in our KB article
Set the Tracking Page Limit (for if you only want to stamp the title pages, etc.)
Set the Font Color to make the text stand out or blend in
Set the Font Size – from 6pt all the way up to 20pt!
Set the X and Y position of the stamp to put it right where you want it.
On Y and Y Positions
The X and Y positions are specified in points. There are 72 points in an inch.
The new X and Y positions can be tricky- every PDF has an “origin” that the X and Y coordinates offset from. For most Portrait 8 1/2″ x 11″ pages the origin is in the bottom left corner (and the default stamp is x20, y10 putting it just up and over so it appears in the bottom left corner) but for other page sizes, landscape layout, and non-default page sizes it could be in the bottom right.
To help you figure it out and get it just right we’ve also added a preview link where you can open your PDF and see the stamp exactly where it will appear when buyers purchase it. You might have to fiddle with it for a bit to get it right, but the preview means you can rapidly check where it’s printing and adjust in no time.
DPD vendors now have the ability, with one click, to update all previous buyers of a download product with the currently uploaded file. This feature is included with all plans $10/mo or more at no additional cost.
On the product detail page (available for each product on the Products list in DPD) you now have a button at the top to “Send Product Update.” This button will open a form that looks strangely similar to our “Send Customer Newsletter” feature but has one key difference- When this email is sent to your buyers it will also include a new, reactivated purchase link to the customer so they can download the currently uploaded version of your product file.
This feature works for two types of products: Download and Bundle / Combo products that contain a download product.
Download Products:
Sending an updated download to your customers is very straightforward- Go to the product’s detail page, click the Send Product Update button, optionally select a purchase date range you want to update (for example, if you only want to update the people that bought since the Jan 1st, 2012), edit your update email message where you can include what is new in this version, a thank you message, etc., and send!
All your customers who purchased that product will have their purchases reactivated, an email sent to them with the new purchase link and your message, and will be able to download the currently uploaded product file.
Bundled / Combo Products:
You send a bundled product update the same way as a download, but how DPD handles them is a bit different. For bundles that contain a download, DPD will re-evaluate every purchase and add (or remove) the current set of items in the combo before reactivating the download and sending the link / email.
This means-
If you just update the currently attached products in the bundle, the customer will get the new versions of the files in the attached products.
If you add an item to the bundle (such as a new template, supplemental PDF, etc.) the customer will have the new items you added to the bundle available on their download page when you send the product update.
If you remove an item from the bundle (for instance, outdated instructions or something you combined with another product in the combo) the item will be removed and not available to the customer when you send a product update.
Lets take a moment to talk about the implications of this feature.
Now, when you sell a product you can include free updates for a period of time (or forever) with the purchase. All you have to do when you update is upload the new file for your product to DPD, send the product update, and you’re done! DPD will automatically handle the download reactivation and sending of the emails. Easy!
Lets say you sell a product that has additional items you regularly add to enhance or expand the product. For example, a website script. You might make more themes for this script available on a regular basis and need to distribute them to your paying customers securely. If you create your product as a bundle with the main script + any additional themes, you can easily add a new theme at any time to the bundle, send a product update, and DPD will re-evaluate all previous purchases, find any parts that were added after the customer bought your bundle, add them, and send the product update!
In this way products and supplemental files can be updated with one click, delivering more value and content to your buyers.
We’re really excited about this feature and welcome any feedback you may have on it- specifically, we’re looking for how we can make it fit how you do business and make it a more valuable feature for everyone. Email options? More filters to narrow the customer group that gets updates? Let us know!
Other fixes and changes in this update:
– Changed Profile to Account in the top menu to more accurately describe the items functions
– Fixed an issue with tax and coupons that resulted in a PayPal bug on checkout
– A few typo fixes
– Changed the from: address in newsletter (and the new product update feature above) to come from Store Name
– Improvements to purchase log to store information about product updates and combo re-evaluations
– Tweaked some table alignment / visual elements in the admin
Today we’re happy to announce the release of the iContact integration for DPD.
iContact provides a robust array of tools to create, send and track your email marketing campaigns. We’re fans of iContact- from our testing they were easy to use and integrate with DPD. They also have a 30 day free trial.
Integrating DPD with iContact
Integration takes a few steps due to iContact’s security, but its all straightforward. iContact requires that you authorize DPD to add subscribers to your account and create a new username and password to use with the API.
Enter a password. Note: For security reasons, we recommend that this password be different than your iContact password.
Click Save.
Log in to DPD and visit the integrations page in the left menu
Click the Add button to activate the iContact integration and enter your username and password created step 4 above.
Click save
That’s it! Now all sales for the selected store will pass their customer information to your iContact list.
We’ve got a couple more integrations we’re working on as we move down our list of requests. If anyone has any questions or comments please feel free to send us a support ticket or comment on this post and we’ll do our best to get you squared away.
Starting today, everyone will see an Integrations link appear in their left navigation menu. Integrations replace the notify url and notify email feature we’ve been using to work with AWeber and MailChimp. Today’s release includes five integrations: MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, URL Notify, and Email Notify.
You can enable as many integrations at once as you want.
New! GetResponse Integration
We’ve added a GetResponse integration. Enter your API key, choose which campaign to subscribe your customer to, and you’re done. Easy. (We love easy.)
Upgraded MailChimp Integration
The MailChimp integration has been upgraded. You can now select which list to subscribe your customers to and you no longer need to setup anything in your MailChimp account. If you’ve already setup DPD to work with MailChimp don’t worry–everything will continue to work.
And More!?
We’re not done with adding integrations just yet. We have at least three more planned to be released over the next week in the order they’ve been requested.
Also in This Update
Affiliate links no longer use the affiliate’s username (which is sometimes an email address). We now generate a completely random affiliate ID instead. Existing affiliate links will continue to work indefinitely so you don’t need to rush out and update them, but all future links will use the new random ID.
We’ve fixed the MP3 preview feature for those of you running on a secure (HTTPS) web site. Thanks for the feedback!
Over the past few months we’ve been working on a new and improved DPD checkout experience for buyers. We went in to the project with a few key goals in mind:
To allow for greater customization and integration of the DPD checkout and delivery process with vendor sites
Lay the groundwork for more processors, including merchant accounts
To build a system where we could add more advanced features that vendors were asking for
Today we’ve published an update that includes the new and improved DPD Cart. This is a total cart rewrite and includes every ecommerce best practice we could cram in to it. Taking information from industry reports, case studies of global ecommerce sites, and more we’ve done our best to make this the best converting checkout experience possible for your stores.
New DPD Cart - Default StyleYou can preview the default theme for the new cart here:
Add to Cart:
Demo Product ($0.00)
Demo Product w/ Key ($0.99)
Customization
The new DPD cart features a theme system that is 100% customizable by you to completely match the look and feel of your website. No longer do you have to load the cart in a lightbox or take your customers to a page that looks like its from a different website- checkout and delivery can be seamlessly integrated in to your website.
To show you the level of customization now possible, here is an Add to Cart button that will add a demo product to a customized template:
Customized New CartDemo Product ($0.00)
To accomplish this, the new theme system uses a Layout Template that serves as a “wrapper” for all checkout and delivery pages. Most vendors will only need to edit this layout to match the DPD cart to their site’s design. For those who want to do more in depth customization, we’ve also provided individual page templates that you can edit to your heart’s content.
The DPD checkout and delivery process is secured by SSL as always, and the all new asset manager allows you to upload your images, stylesheets, and javascript files to DPD so that SSL errors are not thrown by files hosted elsewhere.
DPD Theme EditorThe new theme system uses the popular TWIG template language and the DPD Template Reference clearly documents all available variables and options.
Your own Sub-Domain
The new cart and checkout system is hosted on a custom, seperate sub-domain for each store. Your checkout and delivery will now take place on YOURNAME.dpdcart.com, adding another level of integration and professionalism to your store.
Hosted Product Pages
For those selling without a website, through ads, mobile apps, or just want DPD to host the product pages the new cart also includes hosted product detail pages and index view that include the product description, image, and add-to-cart button. This product detail page and index view is wrapped in the Layout Template and styled by your own custom css / images to match the rest of your checkout process. There is no requirement to use the hosted product pages- they’re completely optional and you can continue to sell with add-to-cart and buy now buttons. You can opt out of displaying your products on the cart view by deselecting the option when creating or editing your product.
We’ll be adding more features to the hosted product pages as well as other DPD generated page in the future.
Coming Features
The new cart checkout and delivery system will allow for many new features in the coming months. Our old cart, while effective, was based on older technology and limiting on the space we had to work with. With the new cart we’ll be able to add additional pages, provide for a PCI compliant checkout experience for Merchant Accounts (with Authorize.net coming soon, more later) and have more room to offer value added services, cross sales, upsales, and more.
This new cart is the groundwork for hundreds of new features that vendors have been asking for in the future.
Upgrading to the New Cart and Checkout
While we’ve thoroughly tested the new cart and checkout we’re going to require that vendors contact support to upgrade their current cart to the new system, at least for the time being. We want to work with early adopters to make sure their theme editing needs are met and get feedback for improvements before releasing the new cart to everyone.
Both the layout and theme page editors have a preview option to see your changes in real time before making them active for your buyers so there is absolutely no risk in diving in and customizing your new cart before switching it to your active checkout. If you make a mistake you can always add a new, clean version of the DPD Standard cart to your theme manager.
If you’d like to use the new and improved cart and checkout for your store, please log in to DPD and contact Support for 1-on-1 setup and assistance.
We’re happy to announce that today we’ve published an update to DPD that gives vendors the ability to create an embedded MP3 track preview player in their site for MP3 audio products sold and delivered through DPD. The only prerequisite to using the track preview feature is that the product file must be an MP3 audio file that is not contained in a zip or other container.
The MP3 preview player is based on the popular and easy to customize AudioPlayer flash based player. Vendors can select any segment of their MP3 product file to play in the preview player, up to 30 seconds in length. Both the player and music sample clip are delivered from DPD servers so you can use this feature on free web hosts and other limited space websites. The mp3 preview uses its own resampled mp3 track and not the actual product file so it is impossible to exploit the player to download your paid mp3.
To create a MP3 preview for your audio product in DPD, simply go to the product’s details page from your product list.
Product Details Page- Music Sample
From there you’ll see the Music Sample section where you can set the start and end points (in seconds) to create your preview track.
Edit Music Clip Page
Once you’ve saved your preview track you can grab the embed code from your details page and insert it in to your web page.
Here is an example player with no customization done:
Loading Music Player…
Full details and all the available configuration options are covered in the article Creating MP3 Samples in the DPD Knowledgebase.
Only minutes ago we published an update to the DPD servers that revamps the product button creation process and allows you to generate buttons for all products in a store on a single page.
We’ve never really been a fan of having to go to each product individually, open the button creator, selecting the style for each button, etc. so we’ve done our best to smooth the process out- Now all you need to do is setup your store in DPD, create your products, and click the green Button Creator link to generate button code for all your products at the same time. It’s a HUGE time saver for setting up many products at once. Pick a button style and get all the buttons for your entire website in one place!
New Button Creator link to get buttons for all your products.
The cart button creator gives you both the view cart / checkout button code and individual add-to-cart button codes for each product. You have the option of choosing between cart with lightbox (the floaty JavaScript window thing), cart without lightbox, or plain text links for integration with your own button graphics on your site.
Cart Button Creator Page
The instant checkout button creator generates instant checkout buttons (obviously) with your choice of processor if more than one is active on a storefront. You can choose from button code or plain text links like the add-to-cart buttons.
This update is fairly small but it’s paving the way for some big improvements for DPD- soon buttons will not be the only thing you can generate for your products and customizing your checkout experience is going to be more awesome than ever. 😉
This week we added a new feature to our website- live chat through Olark. The verdict so far? We love it. We don’t often write about other services here, but we’re really pleased and think that live chat could be a powerful tool to help our vendors with their sales and conversions so we’re going to tell you our experience thus far-
Olark has a different approach to live chat than many other services- they use the common XMPP protocol for their chat servers instead of proprietary software. For those not up to date on chat protocols, the XMPP protocol is the same thing that Jabber, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and a host of other chat services use. XMPP support is built in to every multi-protocol chat client and is a snap to set up.
Here at DPD that’s pretty important- I’m on Windows 7, Jacob is on a Mac, and Scott gets the geek badge for developing on Ubuntu. We needed something that would work on all platforms and even our Android phones- Olark fit the bill.
Installation
Olark provides you with a bit of javascript to place in the footer of your site. Thats it. It took 30 seconds to integrate Olark with DPD, and 25 of those were waiting for the editor to open.
Client Setup and Usage
Olark integrates with your chat client like any other service and gives you interesting user informationOn my Windows desktop I use Pidgin to keep in contact with the other DPD guys as well as friends and family. Olark integrates with Pidgin using the XMPP protocol as you can see in the screenshot to the right. Visitors to your website are shown with some basic information- where they’re from, what page their looking at, what page referred them to the site, and how long they’ve been browsing around on DPD.
We did a little programmer magic using Olark’s API to automatically display usernames for logged in DPD users to help us be even more effective with support (the logged in visitor’s usernames are blurred in the screenshot to protect our users privacy).
When a user sends a live chat request, it broadcasts a message to all the operators who are online and not “away.” Any operator can reply and “claim” the chat, and if needed you can transfer them to someone else with a simple !transfer command in the chat window. You can also be proactive and pick someone from the list to initiate a chat from your end- you just open a chat window and start typing like you’re sending a message to your Aunt Ruth.
Customization
Olark gives you several themes and lets you further customize themOlark lets you customize the chat box to your hearts content. They have several pre-made themes, and you can further customize the available themes to your liking.
There are a lot of extra customization features too- You can customize your offline message (as we’ve done with a link to our knowledge base), specify what email to send offline messages to, window behavior and options, and more.
Reports, Transcripts, and More
In addition to integrating with Google Analytics, Olark has built in stats from Mixpanel that show how many visitors have been to your site while you were online, how many you missed when you were offline, and how many chats you had for a given time period. This is great for figuring out the best times to offer live support!
Olark's built-in stats show engagement numbers
Olark can also optionally record transcripts and email them to a specified address, great for quality control, follow-up, and supervisory functions.
Olark’s Hatchery is their experimental playground with some neat stuff in the works- you can optionally enable an auto-translate plugin that uses Google Translate or check out some new experimental themes. It’s great to use a service that is under active development!
Support
We haven’t really had any problems with the service, but Olark has a well documented API that let Jacob add our user data to the chat widget in minutes. For the one question I had, I chatted up Olark on their site and spoke to Zach, one of the Olark founders who promptly answered my question. He seems like a pretty swell guy too 🙂
Olark does have premium email support for paid users and I expect that will be just as great as the rest of our Olark experience when we need it.
The Verdict? We love it.
There are a lot of things we like about Olark– it’s pretty awesome to see the visitors on your site, where they came from, and where they are in the world in real time. The live chat works well and the extreme ease of setting it up in our own chat clients, with no annoying software, gets bonus points in our book. We’ve generated new happy customers with the live chat feature, and thats really the bottom line.
Olark plans with unlimited conversations start at $15/mo and they even offer a free plan limited to 20 conversations a month so you can try it out and see if you like it. This is one service we wholeheartedly recommend to our vendors and we bet it will improve your conversions too.
DPD is not affiliated with Olark in any way, we’re just happy customers 🙂
In 2009, comScore reported that online spending increased 5 percent on Cyber Monday to $887 Million. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday being the two busiest online shopping days of the year, we thought it was a great time to share with DPD vendors how to make special, limited coupons to entice sales during these spending frenzies.
DPD’s coupon controls offer a couple unique features to build excitement and offer a compelling call to action for your buyers that are especially applicable to seasonal sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
Use Limits – “50% Off Only To The First 100 Customers!”
DPD coupons can be configured to only work for a specified number of uses. This is great for promotions where the first X number of people get a special deal, or to limit the total number of people that can take advantage of the offer.
Vendors can set an activation date and time as well as when a coupon automatically deactivates. This can be set down to the minute so a coupon promotion can last minutes, hours, days, or weeks.
Setting up a Limited Coupon:
In the screenshot below, we’ve set the limits for a special seasonal discount coupon that will only be valid for the first 100 customers and only from 12:01AM Black Friday (Nov. 26th) through midnight on Cyber Monday (Nov 29th). This is just an example- you can set your coupon to your own discount conditions.
DPD Coupon Discount Conditions
Setting up your own limited coupon is easy- you can mix and match any of the options below:
Required Product – If you only want this coupon to apply to a specific product in your store, select it here. Otherwise, leave it on Any Product to allow them to use the coupon for any purchase.
Max Uses – If you only want to allow this coupon to be used a specific number of times, such as a limited promotion for the first 50 buyers, then set this number to the number of checkouts with the coupon you want to allow. If you want the coupon to be available to all customers then leave this blank or 0 for unlimited.
This is not a limit on the number of times a coupon can be used on one checkout. DPD never allows coupon stacking where they can apply the same coupon to one order twice.
Minimum Order Amount – If you only want this coupon to apply to a minimum order, set that amount here. For example, you might have a coupon for “20% off your order of $50 or more!” In that case, you would set your 20% off coupon minimum order amount to “50”
Minimum Quantity – If you want a coupon to only work when a set number of items are being purchased, enter that number of items here. For example, “20% off when you buy 3 items or more!”
Activation / Deactivation Date / Times – This is where you set a range of time for your coupon to be active where it can be used. This is useful for both preparing promotions beforehand as well as creating limited time offers.
DPD has a handy date picker where you can select the dates for your promotion. For those wanting down to the minute control, you can set the time of day when the coupon will activate/deactivate. All times in DPD are 24-Hour time, (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada), and the common city associated with the time zone is New York.
Please note, if you set a coupon for a future activation date / time then it will appear as inactive in DPD until that time, even if you set the status to active when creating the coupon. DPD will automatically activate the coupon at the set activation date/time.
With DPD coupon discount conditions a whole range of “limited” promotion opertunities are available. From “Limited Time” and “First 50 customer” call-to-action offers to upsale inducing discounts on $XX cart total or X number of items, DPD offers the controls to set a promotion up just how you want and make more sales!
Why does it seem like we only update on Fridays now?
This morning we released an update that brings enhanced security options to PDF products. In addition to PDF Buyer Tracking / Stamping that marks each page of the PDF with the buyer’s information to discourage sharing, DPD can now automatically encrypt your PDF documents to prevent tampering and minimize plagiarism and abuse.
Using the new feature, DPD will automatically encrypt your PDF document to lock future editing. You also have the option to prevent printing as well as prevent copying of the PDF contents (disables copying and pasting of the PDF text).
PDF Advanced Options Panel with PDF Stamping and PDF Encryption Options
You can use the new PDF encryption feature with or without PDF Buyer Tracking / Stamping. When you use both, DPD will automatically add your tracking stamp to the pages you specify, then encrypt the PDF to prevent removal.
Like all DPD features, setting up PDF encryption is as simple as clicking a few options when configuring your product- no complicated encryption URLs or keys.
The same rules apply for PDF documents using the encryption feature as with the stamping feature- we must be able to edit your PDF document to apply the stamp so you must upload an unsecured PDF, but now we’ll lock it down tight when we’re done!
If anyone has any questions or comments on the new PDF encryption feature we’re here to help! Leave a comment here or submit a support request and we’ll do our best to answer any questions you may have!
DPD is an all-in-one shopping cart and digital fulfillment service for downloadable products. Serving thousands of stores, DPD processes and delivers millions worth of downloads each year.
