The last month has been a busy time at Digital Delivery App HQ. Here's some of the things that have been going on:

Server Hardware Upgrade

After a large software upgrade towards the end of the last year, we've now performed a large hardware upgrade. This includes a new uber scalable design, more processing power, faster caching and better monitoring. The migration completed over the weekend with no downtime and we're currently sitting at 10x capacity we had last week. We spent a lot of time worrying about the scalability of the service in the future so with our new design dropping in new resource is a breeze. With new sub-minute resolution monitoring we can monitor long term performance of the system and know exactly when upgrades will be needed. A few customers have already reported an increase in site speed and we're glad it's noticable (it wasn't exactly slow beforehand either!). With our new architecture we can keep this level of service for the long term and won't be effected by flash sales, big launches or any other such events that our customers regularly challenge us with!

Affiliate site links

Previously accounts were limited to one affiliate site link but we have now lifted this restriction allowing you to create as many site links as you like. This is extremely useful for merchants running several sites through one account. Site links can be managed from the general affiliates page under the Account tab.

Shopify integration upgrade

Shopify integration has been upgraded to provide a smoother experience. We now have an easier onboarding process, more importing options and the ability to add download links to customer account areas. This has been based on customer feedback so many thanks for sending in all the emails.

Stripe GBP support

Stripe has added Beta support for pounds sterling (GBP) with euros on the way soon. We're on the beta so have tested and added support for other merchants that are too. We'll add euro support as soon as it's released by Stripe.

That's all for now. Plenty more exciting stuff in the pipeline the next few months. Keep your eyes peeled on the blog for more.

A common support request for merchants selling digital goods is for the download url for an order taken x weeks/months/years ago. This is especially common when updating a product and informing customers via a different mechanism than our inbuilt system (which includes the link). These support requests don't seem like much but as the number of orders increases so does the amount of time taken. This makes it a prime candidate for automation!

After discussion with many customers facing this problem, I'm glad to announce a mechanism for customers to resend their order email. If you view the button code for any Product, Package or Subscription there's now another "recover order" option as shown in this screenshot:

This url can be used on your sales website, in support forums, in emails or wherever else you fancy. When a customer enters their email, and they've made an order of one of your items, then their original order email is resent. They will need to use the same email address as when they ordered so it's a good idea to make this clear wherever you distribute the link as some people use multiple email addresses. The link is the same for all your items so there's no need to repeat for each item you sell.

This is a simple solution that shifts the focus to helping the customer solve their own problem. As they get their download link instantly they end up much happier, and I'm sure merchants will be equally happy with less support requests!

We hope you find the new functionality useful and as always please send us any feedback you have.

Just a quick update to say we've moved the blog over to http://www.digitaldeliveryapp.com/blog Subscribers of the feed should be automatically updated as it's running through feedburner, although apologies go out to those who get all the back posts marked as unread. If you're not using the feedburner feed now's a great time to start: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalDeliveryAppBlog

This change was a result of Posterous selling out, another sad loss of a great technology.

Today we're launching a bulk uploader to make creating lots of products much quicker. As an experiment I created a video to show you the new functionality rather than write a blog post so I hope you enjoy it and let us know your feedback!

Stripe has been a massive success since we introduced it around 18 months ago with the number of people using it really shooting up in recent months. Initially merchants were just looking to offer a second payment option, but more recently we've seen an increasing trend to using them as their exclusive payment provider. Merchants love the ability to look much bigger than their size by taking card payments on their site, without any of the headaches of PCI compliance. With the ability to customise your Digital Delivery App pages as well this leads to a truely seamless checkout experience.

Without doubt the biggest angst we've heard about Stripe is their lack of support outside Canada or the US. That's a need PayMill spotted and launched last year with support for European countries. Today we're glad to announce support for PayMill in Digital Delivery App.

Configuration is just the same as Stripe, or any other gateway for that matter, and can be found under the Account tab and then payment gateways in the sidebar. All that's needed is your PayMill private and public keys:

When customers make purchases they end up at our ususal checkout page:

and of course are redirected straight to download once their card details are verified. Everything else is the same as the other gateways so there's no changes in buyer experience to worry about. You can of course try it out for yourself on our demo page

The functionality is live now so go ahead and get setup now. We hope you find it useful and if our experience with Stripe is anything to go by, this is going to be a real game change for European merchants.

Today I'm glad to announce the first of several major enhancements to our service we're planning this year. These are technically new features but really we see them as so much more - major rethinks, big improvements to existing processes or new additions that make our service really go above and beyond. They're all based on huge amounts of customer feedback, experts we've consulted in various fields and of course everything we've learned about digital delivery in the last two and a bit years. We're think they're real game changers and needless to say are super excited about announcing more as the year progresses.

Until I wet your appetite any further here's todays announcement. The orders tab has had a complete overhaul and now represents more of a reporting section. As you can see from the screenshots, the main focus of the page is now a graph that shows your income or profit over a period of time. This defaults to the last month but can easily be changed using the date selector in the top right corner. Any period from from one day to the last two years is supported and with the graph makes it very easy to see how your orders have progressed over your chosen time period.

Listed right under the graph are key metrics - how many orders you've taken, how much money you're making and how well you're converting in the checkout process (for conversion rate we've also compiled some tips to help you improve this here). This helps you get a quick statistical overview of the data period you're examining. Under that you can then see individual orders which can be clicked for further details much like the old interface.

Down the left of the page is a series of options that lets you apply further filters to the graph - whether that be orders for a specific item, orders referred by a specific affiliate or orders where certain discount codes were used. There's even an advanced section that lets you filter the orders on a combination of criteria. Further down the sidebar you'll find options for searching out specific orders and downloading data as a CSV.

With this major rework of the orders page we've tried to cover all use cases we've heard about but keeping the interface simple and easy to use in true Digital Delivery App style. If there's something we've not covered that you feel you need please get in touch as we'd love to hear your use case. In the meantime we hope you enjoy the new functionality.

One of the confusing aspects of selling digital files is timezones.  Most vendors have buyers worldwide and whilst they may buy the transaction at 3pm their local time, this could be 9am your local time.  To make matters more confusing our servers run on GMT (which could be different again) and it is this time that is reported in your dashboard.  As of today we're introducing timezone support that allows you to choose your timezone.  You can make the change right on the Account home page:

We've guessed your timezone based on your country setting so please make sure you review this, especially if living in a country with multiple timezones.  All the places where timezones are used: the graph, orders page, discount codes, CSV sales reports, the weekly/monthly reports and many more are now all updated to show you the time in your local timezone.  We even handle summer time (or DST) seeemlessly too.

For UI clarity we've added the most common timezones to the dropdown but others are available - just drop the support team an email if you require a non-listed one.  We hope you find this update useful - its been much requested and should make managing your orders much easier.

As a UK company we feel the pain of many of our european based customers who want to use internet services that are US based only. It can be really frustrating when there's no alternative in Europe that offers the same functionality and you feel left behind by US based competitors. This problem is no more apparent than the financial industry where regulation means that it often takes a couple of years before sites make the jump across the pond. As our service has grown we've noticed an increasing amount of UK customers frustrated about the lack of a merchant gateway, so today we're glad to announce support for SagePay.

SagePay is a UK based payment gateway that allows customers to connect to their merchant account, or use SagePay as both a payment gateway and merchant account (combining functionality and reducing fees). It's been a commonly requested service to integrate and our experience dealing with them so far has been very positive. So we're glad to be able to announce support which is available on the site from today.

Setting up SagePay with Digital Delivery App is a breeze - simply enter you vendor id into the configuration panel under the payment gateway section and you can start taking payments. You will of course need a SagePay account which can take a few days to come through (apply here) but once you have that sorted you're ready to go.  More details on SagePay can be found in our knowledge base article.

Finally, as this is going to be our last post of the year, may we take this opportunity to wish all our customers a Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2013. We got lots of exciting things planned for the next year and we look forward to sharing them with you.

PDF stamping is a great little feature we offer that allows you to add details of the buyer (for example their name, email, transaction id) to the bottom of a pdf file that you sell. This means when the buyer downloads their file they have a customised version of the document with their details on. Apart from a nice touch of personalisation this discourages buyers from illegally sharing the item with other people - their details are on in the file after all. We've offered PDF stamping from day 1 at Digital Delivery App and its been a very popular feature.

Today we're announcing a long overdue update that lets you customise the contents and style of the stamp. Specifically size, colour, alignment, font, the pages that are stamped and of course the text itself can all be customised. This is all controlled through a new configuration screen we've released under the Account tab:

Existing users of the feature are setup with the defaults we used before but are of course now free to change the stamping to work better for them. There's a preview feature too so you can test out your changes before committing them.

We hope this is of use to merchants selling pdf files but didn't feel they could use the feature in its old form. And if you've not tried out the feature before then now might be a good time to get started.

Since the launch of Digital Delivery App downloads have been time limited which stops any downloading of files once a configurable period of time has passed. We believe this is the best way to restrict access to your files. The reason is people who share digital goods illegally tend to do so after they have consumed the good and decided it worth passing on. Generally this takes 24 hours as a minimum. With time limited download you can have already cut the buyer off before this peroid passes. With the alternative, download tracking, where a number of downloads are permitted, the buyer can come back months later and still pass on a usable link.

All that said, over the last few months we've since increasing amounts of genuine use cases for the ability to restrict by download attempts so today I'm glad to announce that it's now possible to do this. The configuration is done under the Downloads section of the Account tab. There you can limit by time (as was available before), download attempts, both or neither (the old "forever" option). The both option gives a best of both worlds where you can limit by both the download attemps and a period of time, with the download access being revoked as soon as one of the options expires. The screenshot below shows the revised screen and you'll notice the ability to turn each of the options on or off:

If you had a download validity of "forever" before you have been automatically moved over to having no download restrictions under the new version, which is the same behaviour. This does also sadly remove the bug where our system would report forever as a date in 2022 which caused much ammusment to some merchants (really we don't know when the world is going to end, but we hope it's not that soon!)

This new feature has also introduced a restructure to the way downloads work that will enable us to release some exciting new features in the future.  We hope you enjoy the new release and please let us know your experiences.