Category: Uncategorized

Checkout at your own Subdomain with Custom Cart URL!

  • Jason@DPD
  • May 18, 2023
  • No Comments

We’ve just released Custom Cart URLs, a much-requested feature that lets you point a subdomain of your own website at the DPD cart and checkout. This new feature is available to all plans that include 30 products and greater.

As a demo, we’ve pointed our DPD Demo Cart normally located at https://demo.dpdcart.com to https://store.portallabs.com.

Once configured for your store the entire checkout process including all pre-sale pages, cart and checkout, and delivery pages happens at your custom subdomain. This also includes all email activation links and order process / transactional emails too!

Getting it Setup:

Setup is straightforward and requires you create two DNS records at your current website host or domain registrar. One is a CNAME record that points your subdomain at our servers (like store.mycoolwebsite.com) and the second is a TXT record that verifies your ownership of the domain.

This TXT record is an added security feature that prevents a 3rd party from assuming control of your cart and checkout. This verification key should be treated like a secure password that should never be shared outside your organization or trusted web developer.

Some Important Notes:

  1. Existing buttons/links using your *.dpdcart.com checkout URL will always work, but the dpdcart.com URL will be displayed in the address bar. You will need to update existing buttons/links with the new Custom Cart URL for your new domain to be shown.
  2. Once a Custom Cart URL is configured for the store, all new buttons and links generated using the DPD admin for that store will use the new custom cart URL instead of the *.dpdcart.com domain.
  3. We manage the SSL for your Custom Cart URL. You do not need to configure SSL on your domain.
  4. Changing your Custom Cart URL after deploying buttons/links with an existing Custom Cart URL (e.g. changing “store.portallabs.com” to “mystore.portallabs.com”) will cause all links and buttons using the old Custom Cart URL to break. They will need to be replaced with the new links/buttons using your new Custom Cart URL so be sure you like the subdomain you choose before you start generating new buttons/link codes!
  5. Deleting the Custom Cart URL value from the DPD admin store setup page will revert it back to the default behavior of only generating and resolving your *.dpdcart.com domain for links.

For detailed instructions on how to setup your Custom Cart URL, please see our KB article here:
Using a Custom Cart URL for your DPD Cart and Checkout

New Help and Support Tools!

  • Jason@DPD
  • March 20, 2019
  • 2 Comments

We’ve been working hard to make DPD easier to use and understand. We’ve recently updated our admin to a new, more logical layout with option consolidation and organization, and we’re adding new support tools to guide you along the way.

On-Page Guides and Tours

We’ve started adding on-page guides and tours to explain how to find things, what each item on the page does, and to help people accomplish common tasks we regularly get support questions about.

To open the on-page guides, click the little flag icon in the bottom right corner of the page:

A menu will open with the guides and tutorials available for that module:

These guides and tours appear right on the DPD page, highlighting fields and buttons and giving you extra information on what each thing does and how it’s used:

If you’ve decided I’m too boring and just want to bail out of a guide you can always click the “X” icon in the top right corner at any time.

Right now we’re working to add guides and tours to the top level page (usually the list page) for each module, so as you go to Products, Orders, Customers, etc. in the left menu you should see the icon.

If you don’t see an icon for a specific module we don’t have any guides available for it yet, but we’re working on it!

On-Page Knowledge Base Links

We’ve added links to most modules that go directly to the KB section that relates to that module. This should save everyone time looking up help or waiting for a support response.

For example, the KB link on the Products page links directly to the Working with Products page in the KB (which we’ve also reorganized to line up more cleanly with modules in DPD).

If you have advanced questions that aren’t answered by the on-page guides or just like reading through documentation that reads like stereo instructions then this is the link for you.

Live Chat / Support Tickets

Our dedicated live chat guy Chase is available Monday – Friday, 9AM – 5PM Eastern for live chat (except when he gets cranky and we have to let him go to the bathroom or eat).

You can get to the Live Chat interface from the orange tab in the bottom right corner of the screen:

If live chat is not available you’ll see a “Submit Support Ticket” message that will let you…. submit a support ticket. We’ll reply just as soon as we can!

We hope these changes make it easier to use and get help with DPD! We’re always looking for feedback on our changes, so drop us a line or post a comment and let us know what you think!

Coming Next Week: All New Vendor Admin

  • Jason@DPD
  • January 2, 2019
  • 4 Comments

We’re making this post ahead of the update (scheduled for Monday, Jan 7th) so everyone will have a bit of a heads up before the log in and everything looks different. We know change is kinda scary, but we promise this one is a good one. We’ve made it easier to find things, cleaned up the design and navigation, and gave everything a modern facelift!

Simplified Navigation

DPD’s navigation was getting cluttered with years of adding new features to our top-level navigation menu. Most stores had over 25 menu items in the main menu alone, and then sometimes multiple sub-pages and menus to get to the option you needed. It was a real drag, and features are cool and all but if you can’t find them when you need them that’s no good either.

So, we’ve cleaned that up quite a bit!

The new navigation shows what module you’re working in at a glance so you don’t get lost and is greatly simplified so you’re not spending 30 seconds scanning through a giant list of options trying to find the thing you need.

Primary and Secondary Actions

We’ve also refined navigation within modules- Instead of having 4 or 5 top level navigation links for product related functions, now you simply go to the Product list and either do the primary action (the green button) or open up the secondary action menu to do other things.

This same “primary action button, secondary actions menu” system is used throughout DPD. For example: the product detail page which is now the one-stop shop for all product related functions. We’ve tried to make all interactions in DPD linear, with a clear straight line to what you want to do instead of 3 different ways to get to a specific option.

Store Option Consolidation

Previously, we’ve been tacking on checkout options on the theme. You want to turn on the coupon field? You had to go to Theme > Edit Current Theme > Find and open the the checkout page options > Edit and save.

This was terrible for a number of reasons, mainly that it was impossible to find anything and you had to write us a support ticket to figure out where to turn on core functionality of DPD.

So, we fixed it! Now all checkout settings are on a page thats under Settings > Checkout. I know, crazy right?! No more clicking 3 layers deep in to the theme system and going through 12 pages of options to find the one you want.

We’ve also consolidated options like the actual store theme, store policies, error page messages, cart page text blocks, etc. to this page to further reduce menu items and places you have to look.

A million other updates too!

We’ve moved the customer view to a timeline layout that lets you see when notes and purchases were made in chronological order, and added stats like Lifetime Value (LTV) and lifetime purchases. We also try to pull in their Gravatar if they’ve set one up so you can put a face with a name, as shown by the ruggedly good looking customer below.

Pages like the Payment Methods page and Integrations page are cleaned up and easier to read and interact with and reflect how most people use DPD.


All in all, this update has touched every single page of the DPD vendor admin and we’ve spent hundreds of hours of development time working on it. We hope everyone likes it! As always, if anyone has a question about where to find something, needs to report a bug, or just general feedback please send us a support ticket or start a live chat from the admin and we’ll do our best to help!

Added Cross-Sales and various bug fixes.

  • Jason@DPD
  • June 6, 2018
  • No Comments

Woo, a non-GDPR post!

This week we released a Cross-Sell feature for products in DPD. This feature lets you offer an additional product to buyers when the add an item to the cart.

Up-Sell: Replace the item they added to the cart with another item

Cross-Sell: (new!) Add an item in addition to the item they added to the cart.

Continue reading Added Cross-Sales and various bug fixes.

Critical Update: Payza.com seized by DOJ, ending support immediately

  • Jason@DPD
  • March 29, 2018
  • No Comments

The Payza.com domain has been seized by the United States Department of Justice.

Payza and its associated an parent companies are being indicted on the following charges:

18 u.s.c. § 371 (Conspiracy);
18 U.S.C. § 1960(a) (Operating an Unlicensed Money Transmission Business);
18 u.s.c. § 1956 (h) (Conspiracy to Launder Monetary Instruments);
D.C. Stat.§ 26-1001 (Money Transmitting without a License)

Additionally, the indictment outlines several other criminal activities such as operating Ponzi and Pyramid schemes, money laundering related to controlled substances, and illegal pornography.

Continue reading Critical Update: Payza.com seized by DOJ, ending support immediately

We quietly made everything faster and better!

  • Jason@DPD
  • August 8, 2017
  • 3 Comments

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!

Continue reading We quietly made everything faster and better!

PayPal Certificate Upgrade Notice

  • Jacob@DPD
  • September 11, 2015
  • 1 Comment

As most of you are already aware, PayPal will be upgrading the SSL certificate for www.paypal.com to SHA-256 on 9/30/2015 and has been sending out notices to pretty much everybody that uses their service.

What DPD is Doing

Our developers have known about this change for months and have taken the necessary action to accommodate it.

What You Need to Do

Nothing! We’ve taken care of this so you can all relax.

If you have further questions please feel free to write in a support ticket or talk with us on livechat.

PayPal is Having IPN Issues, DPD Vendors affected

  • Jason@DPD
  • January 28, 2013
  • No Comments

There have been numerous reports of purchases failing to activate in DPD this morning.

This is caused by a failure of the IPN system on PayPal’s side as outlined in this post by PayPal. As of Jan 28, 12:00 PM PST (Jan 28, 8:00 PM GMT) the IPN system is still broken.

If PayPal does not send the IPNs we can’t activate downloads. This will cause purchases to not appear in your DPD admin and no downloads or activation codes will be delivered by DPD. This is not a problem with DPD or your account- this is a failure of the PayPal payment notification system and there is nothing DPD or the vendor can do except to wait for them to fix it.

Updates from PayPal:

UPDATE 5: We have implemented a fix and IPNs for transactions processed after Jan 28, 10:47 AM PST (Jan 28, 6:47 PM GMT) are being sent now. We are expecting IPNs for new transactions to start being delivered in near real-time within the next hour. We are also estimating that missing IPNs for transactions processed between Jan 27, 11:04 PM PST (Jan 28, 7:04 AM GMT) and Jan 28, 10:47 AM PST (Jan 28, 6:47 PM GMT) will be delivered within the next 24 hours.

We will provide the next update by Jan 28, 3:30 PM PST (Jan 28, 11:30 PM GMT).

UPDATE 6: IPNs for new transactions are currently being delivered in near real-time. We are currently deliverying the IPNs for transactions between Jan 27, 11:04 PM PST (Jan 28, 7:04 AM GMT) and Jan 28, 10:47 AM PST (Jan 28, 6:47 PM GMT). We expect to complete this within the next 24 hours.

We will provide the next update by Jan 28, 7:00 PM PST (Jan 29, 3:00 AM GMT).
Sent Jan 28, 3:26 PM PST by SC

DPD Browser / Platform Stats

  • Jason@DPD
  • February 18, 2010
  • No Comments

Browser Usage ChartWe’re in the middle of a pretty big overhaul of the DPD user interface right now. Because we want DPD to work for the vast majority of our users (and their customers on the cart and delivery pages) we keep a close eye on our visitor platform / browser statistics.

We don’t compile statistics for individual stores or sites (and don’t want to)- these are aggregate numbers across every product, delivery page, cart, and the DPD site itself.

I thought I’d share some basic usage statistics with everyone so they can get some insight in to their fellow vendors as well as the visitors that purchase from their sites:

Platform / Operating System (top 5):

There are really no surprises here.

  1. Windows 85.94%
  2. Macintosh 12.49%
  3. Linux 0.78%
  4. iPhone 0.38%
  5. iPod 0.12%

Browser (top 5):

The Browser stats were interesting to us with Firefox being used more than Internet Explorer among our users and buyers.

  1. Firefox 46.40%
  2. Internet Explorer 36.17%
  3. Safari 8.24%
  4. Chrome 7.09%
  5. Opera 1.60%

Screen Resolutions:

When designing an interface your user’s screen resolution is vitally important- DPD is currently 955px wide to accomidate a 1024×768 resolution monitor. After looking at these statistics we might start thinking about targeting the 1280×1024 width, giving us approx. 220 more pixels of width to work with (about 22% more space).

  1. 1024×768 22.50%
  2. 1280×800 19.31%
  3. 1440×900 11.01%
  4. 1280×1024 10.34%
  5. 1680×1050 8.54%
  6. 1366×768 4.73%
  7. 1920×1200 3.30%
  8. 1920×1080 3.11%
  9. 1152×864 2.48%
  10. 1280×768 1.73%
  11. 1600×900 1.53%
  12. 1280×960 1.35%
  13. 800×600 1.35%

Digging Deeper with Windows

With 85.94%, Windows is far and away the most popular operating system on DPD (and with the entire world). Another thing we have to keep a keen eye on is what Windows and IE version everyone is using- There are drastic differences in how things are displayed between different IE versions and spending time making it work in all of them is something most designers dread.

Windows Breakdown:

From these numbers we can tell that less than 1% (0.54% to be exact) use a Windows operating system older than Windows XP. Vista and Windows 7 are slowly taking over though, with 40.81% of the total.

  1. XP 58.22%
  2. Vista 27.86%
  3. 7 12.95%
  4. Server 2003 0.43%
  5. 98 0.24%
  6. 2000 0.20%
  7. ME 0.06%
  8. 95 0.04%

Internet Explorer Breakdown:

The most critical stat for interface designers and developers is the IE version statistics. There are entire sites dedicated to designer’s hate of IE6, and IE7- while slightly better- is not loved much at all either. IE8 it approaching standards compliance and reaching parity with the Webkit (Safari, Chrome) and Gecko (Firefox) rendering engines, so we’re happy that the majority of our users are installing the free upgrade from Microsoft.

  1. IE 8 56.36%
  2. IE 7 31.89%
  3. IE 6 11.66%
  4. IE 4 0.09%

Occasionally we’ll get a support ticket about having to horizontal scroll to see the entire DPD web page, or about transparent images not displaying correctly in Windows 98. We don’t really have a good reply for these people other than to urge them to upgrade their browser or operating system.

Seriously folks, if you’re using IE6 please go upgrade to IE8– it’s free from Microsoft, more secure, and renders the entire web better. Or try a new browser- DPD actually looks better in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox because of the additional CSS properties these browsers support like rounded corners and drop shadows! All three alternates listed are available for both IE and Mac and are free!

As developers of a service that serves thousands of vendors, tens of thousands of customers, and hundreds of thousands worth of transactions a year we can’t focus our time and energy on the 0.46% of our visitors and shoppers who are using a 12 year old operating system like Windows 98 with IE4- it’s not fair to the other 99.54% of our users who use modern operating systems and browsers and would be better served by us developing new features and improvements.

We hope this was an interesting look at some statistics behind DPD. If there is any interest in future updates we might make a post like this again in the future- let us know what you think!