I Heart DPD! Sorry, E-Junkie.

This is a little off-topic for our blog, but I'm excited about our shopping cart switch to DPD and need to shout it from the rooftops!

Our website, deciphertools.com, sells digital software downloads. For about a year and a half, we've been using e-junkie to handle our shopping cart and communication with our payment processors. e-junkie has been pretty great: easy to setup, easy to manage, not a lot of pain. But, as the shutdown of Google Checkout started looming over us (we only took PayPal and Google Checkout,) and e-junkie forums reported that no new payment processors are being added anytime soon, we had to look for alternatives.

Like a good little web soldier, I Googled "Alternatives to e-junkie" once a month during the summer, but didn't see options that I liked. We don't need a storefront solution to sell hundreds of products, just a solution to handle a small shopping cart, and our digital deliveries (installers and license codes.) Finally, I stumbled on a link to DPD (Digital Product Delivery.)

The basic premise of DPD is extremely similar to e-junkie, so if you're using e-junkie now, it should all make sense: setup product, upload digital goods (DPD also handles PDF stamping if you sell ebooks,) etc etc etc. But, now that I've been using DPD for a few days, I've compiled a list of things that I prefer about DPD over e-junkie:

• The admin website isn't Flash based! If you're addicted to checking your sales like I am, you'll be thrilled to be able to look at the admin site on your iPhone; if not, you'll still be happy about the ridiculously-faster access to your admin dashboard.
• Graph on dashboard. I was so desperate for sales charts, I wrote a small java program to translate e-junkie transaction logs into a line graph. Now, right when I log in to DPD, there's a lovely up-to-date chart waiting for me.
• RELIABLE INTEGRATION (can you tell that one made me mad?) Google Analytics & Adwords support that doesn't leave me guessing about our ad spending. Excellent support for custom integrations (like Visual Website Optimizer, which I LOVE.) You can add custom tracking code that will be put on each shopping cart page, so your sales funnel doesn't include a questionable black hole.
• Cleaner checkout pages. I love e-junkie, but the checkout pages remind me of college (and that was the late nineties.) DPD has nice clean checkout pages, and support for your own theming if you're into that.
• Non-confusing credit card payments, without the need for a bank merchant account. Since we used a shopping cart (and not buy-it-now buttons,) our only option for credit-card payments were PayPal (not obvious to our customers that they don't need an account) and Authorize.net. However, Authorize.net requires a bank merchant account, which is a bit of a pain. With DPD, we added Stripe as a payment option, and now we have a very obvious credit card payment system. Upshot: At least 80% of our sales go through Stripe now, and we're not losing customers to payment-system-signup friction.

There's a lot more that I could list (simple affiliate system, subscription support, different price point support, did I mention the admin page loads a lot faster?!) but I think you're getting the idea. Go check out DPD. It's about the same price point as e-junkie ($10 a month for 20 products and 1GB of space, goes up reasonably from there) and quite superior for our needs.

(You may have noticed that I used an affiliate link -- DPD has a very generous affiliate program as well. I would write this post even without the affiliate link though, since I think DPD is a much better solution.)

Edit August 27, 2015: There is a mobile app to check your GetDPD sales now. It's excellent!