13

DAP’s Built-In Shopping Cart vs 1ShoppingCart vs WooCommerce

DAP has a built-in and robust Shopping Cart that allows you to sell digital products. And it comes free with your purchase of DAP.

Plus you can also do 1-click Upsells if you’re using Stripe, Authorize.net or Paypal Payments Pro.

However, DAP’s cart is primarily meant for digital products like memberships, subscriptions, information products, digital downloads, etc.

DAP does not have “real-world” physical product sales features – like size, color, quantity, sales tax, vat, volume discounts, etc.

So, for physical products that require special “physical” features, you’re better off using 1SiteAutomation.com (private label of 1shoppingcart) or WooCommerce.

And since DAP fully integrates with 1SiteAutomation (and all 1ShoppingCart private labels) and WooCommerce, you can still have the buyer of your physical product added to DAP, and use DAP as the “digital content delivery system” – basically, to deliver digital content in the form of WordPress Pages/Posts, Video, Audio, PDF reports, etc.

But if you’re primarily going to be selling subscription-based membership and digital products or one-time info products, then the powerful and free DAP Shopping Cart Plugin will more than serve your purpose.

WooCommerce Integration: Click here

1ShoppingCart BONUS

Click here to find out how you can get DAP for free (for a limited time only).

 

32

Integrating Clickbank via INS

DAP has built-in support for ClickBank’s Instant Notification Services (INS) (starting v3.9)

This is very similar to Paypal’s Instant Payment Notification (IPN).

The ClickBank INS notification will be processed instantly in real time, and your members will receive their welcome email with their membership login info instantly after purchase.

For high-level ClickBank user-flow, see this post.

Integrating with ClickBank is the same whether it’s a one-time product, a subscription product with recurring payments, or a PitchPlus (one-click upsells) product.

CB INS Setup

1. Login to your ClickBank account

2. Go to the “Account Settings” tab at the top

3. Click on “My Site” from the sub-menu at the top.

4. Under Advanced Tools, update the Instant Notification Service URL (accept the terms of service etc), and make sure the URL points to:

http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-clickbank.php

Replace YourSite.com above with your actual domain name.

5.  Screenshot below shows Version 1.0, but starting DAP v4.2, we have added support for CB INS 2.1.

So if you’re using DAP v4.2 or later, then select INS Version 2.0 and set the CB INS URL TO :

http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-clickbank-2.1.php

But if you’re using DAP v4.1 or earlier, then select Version 1.0

and set INS URL TO:

http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-clickbank.php

6. Whatever value you put in the Secret Key field in ClickBank (see image above), put the same value (must be ALL UPPERCASE) in to your DAP Admin Dashboard on your web site, at:

Setup > Config > Payment Processing > Secret Authorization Key used when interfacing with external systems

7. The Product Title in CB must match the Product Name in DAP.

8. The Thank You Page url in CB product settings page, should be set to point a static thank-you page you create in your WordPress blog – something like http://YourSite.com/thank-you/ .

And the page should state something to the effect of…

Thank you for your purchase. The download information for the product you just purchased has been sent to the email id you just use during the purchase.

Please check that email id in a few minutes, and you will see an email from us with your login information.

That’s it!

Testing

Make a test purchase.

If the integration was setup correctly, the user will be registered in DAP.  You will find the user account in the DAP Users > Manage screen and you will find the completed transaction / order details on the DAP Orders page.

If the test order is listed in DAP Orders page, then CB is correctly integrated with DAP.  Check the payment status in DAP Orders page. If it says Success, but no welcome/thank-you email got sent, then make sure you set the thank-you email for that product in DAP products page.

Troubleshooting

If no order is listed in DAP orders page for the test purchase, then CB is not integrated with DAP.

To troubleshoot, do the following:

1. Set DAP Setup > Config > Log Level to 5.
2. Empty log content under System -> Logs.
3. Run another test purchase.
4. Send us the log snippet from System -> Logs.

22

Sending HTML Email

DAP allows you to send out HTML content in all of the following:

1. Double-optin email body
2. Thank-you email body
3. Autoresponder email body, and
4. Broadcast email body

DAP can send out “Multi-part” emails – that is, emails that have both a “text” portion, and an “HTML” portion. If there are any email clients out there that cannot handle HTML email (in the year 2010, there are really no such clients, really), then the “text” portion of the same email will be shown to the recipient.

To send out HTML emails, it is very important that you insert the HTML Email Start Tag – [HTML_START] – into the body of your email before you insert any HTML tags.

The same goes for any email that you want to send out in HTML format: Just before you insert your HTML code, just be sure to insert the HTML Email Start Tag [HTML_START].

And the HTML you insert should be full-blown HTML, starting with the <html><body>…. and ending with </html></body> tags.

NOTE: DAP does not have a built-in editor to create the HTML yet. So you will have to create the HTML code outside of DAP – either using a HTML editor like Dreamweaver, or you could even compose a draft page in WordPress, and use that as the source of your HTML code that you would then use within DAP to send out HTML email.

0

CSV File Error During Bulk-Add Users

When you look at the “System > Job Queue” screen, you see one line that shows this error…

Action: BulkAddCSVToProduct
Message: Error in CSV File

You were probably trying to to Bulk-Add Users to DAP. Or do a Broadcast email to a CSV file. In either case, there was an error in processing your request, because one of the following happened:

1) The CSV file could not be created in /dap/bulk/ folder because of a permission issue (try CHMOD 755), so when the cron task ran, it could not find the CSV file (or the file was corrupted for some reason).

2) The list of email addresses within the CSV file were not in the right format – Order should be: Email,FirstName,LastName ( LastName is optional)

 

How To Fix It

If a job fails, then there’s no way to “fix it and re-run it” right now. So you basically have to delete the job, and then submit a new one. So if a Bulk-Add job erros with the above message, then here’s what you need to do…

A) Click on the “Delete Jobs In Error” link on the “System > Job Queue” page. That will delete all jobs that have failed for whatever reason.

B) You should also clear out the /dap/bulk/ folder to make sure you delete any old, or errored out CSV files from that folder.

11

vBulletin Integration

Click Here for detailed vBulletin -> DAP setup instructions.

Click Here for DAP->vBulletin integration FAQ/Usecases

Video 1: DAP/vBulletin Integration

[s3mv]vbintro.mp4,800,600,false,false[/s3mv]

Video 2: Demo of vBulletin Integration

[s3mv]vbintro2.mp4,800,600,false,false[/s3mv]

Product/Forum Chaining

This is by far the most exciting feature in 3.9. I don’t think even we, the developers of DAP, have been this excited about a new feature.

Now, with just a few clicks of the mouse, you can completely automate your Forum management, and do some really slick stuff like…

* “Silver” Members get posting access only to the following vB forums…
– Introductions
– General Discussions

* “Gold” members get access to all above, plus the forum “Puppy Potty Training Tips”. So they get access to the following vB forums…
– Introductions
– General Discussions
– Puppy Potty Training Tips

* “Platinum” members get access to ALL of the forums above, PLUS some premium forums, like “Joint Ventures”, “Starting Your Own Dog Business”, “Premium Support”, and more. So they get access to…
– Introductions
– General Discussions
– Puppy Potty Training Tips
– Joint Ventures
– Platinum Mastermind
– Starting Your Own Dog Business
– Premium Support

And then you can add some more rules like…

Both Gold & Silver can just VIEW the “Premium Support” forums, but cannot POST anything.

And Gold & Silver CANNOT even VIEW the “Joint Ventures”, “Platinum Mastermind”, “Starting Your Own Dog Business”.

See how insanely powerful this can get?

Sure, you could have a forum with WP-based forum plugins like bbPress and Simple:Press too.

But comparing those WP forums to vBulletin? That’s like putting a kid who’s just completed one month of boxing lessons, in a ring with Mike Tyson right after someone said something mean about his mother!

And can you imagine what it would do to your “retention rate”, when you tell your members that if they cancel their subscription, they will lose access to the entire community of like minded people?

And to think that we’re just scratching the surface of monetizing forums here.

The vBulletin forum software is so rich in rules and user roles, and the DAP integration with vB is so tight that you could start just a “Forums Only” membership site and charge just for access to your forums!

Imagine creating a one-time product where for $10, they get to post in a “Special Offers” forum where they can advertise their product or service?

Or how about charging $10 to post in a forum called “Outsourcing”, where they can advertise their need to hire someone either for both long-term and short-term projects? It would be free to view for everyone, but you have to pay-to-post]

– Veena Prashanth
Co-Founder & Co-Developer, DAP

10

DAP As A Global Content + Affiliate Hub

DAP can only protect content on the same domain where it is installed.

So, if you install DAP on SiteA.com, then DAP can only protect content (blog posts/pages and files) on SiteA.com.

If you install DAP on subdomain1.SiteA.com, then DAP can only protect content (blog posts/pages and files) on subdomain1.SiteA.com.

DAP on SiteA.com cannot protect content on SiteB.com.

DAP on SiteA.com cannot protect content on subdomain.SiteA.com.

Similarly, DAP installed on subdomain.SiteA.com cannot protect content on the main domain, SiteA.com

Now, let’s say you own a network of web sites, some sell a product, some sell a membership course, some sell a physical product, and some just exist to build a list.

So let’s say you have 10 sites in all.

And you want someone who’s an affiliate on Site A, to be an affiliate for all ten, and be able to get commissions if the person he referred goes on to purchase a product from any of your 10 web sites.

Yup, DAP can handle that. And here’s how…

Configuration #1

Summary: Parent.com has DAP. Your sales pages are all on different sites, like ChildA.com, ChildB.com and ChildC.com. But all buy buttons point right back to the main DAP site (Parent.com) and that’s where all buyers from all child sites are eventually added to, regardless of where the sale was initiated from. So all members are actually created on Parent.com, and that’s where everyone would log in to access the member content.

1) Install DAP on your main “Parent” site where you have all of your content that needs to be protected/delivered. Make sure all of your content for all of your sites is on this main “Parent” (hub) site.

2) You can then have multiple “Child” sites – completely different domains from your parent site – which are basically just “sales page only” sites. Of course you can have a wordpress blog on each of them and have as much content as you want. Just put the main content to be delivered on the Parent site.

2A) On each of these child sites, you can use any DAP-supported payment processors to sell your products. So for eg., on one “child” site, you can use ClickBank, on another, you can use Paypal, on another you use e-junkie, etc.

3) All buyers end up with an account on your “Parent” site, which is where they get to access their content too. You can set up multiple blogs on one site for different look & feel for all of your various products, and deliver content from the specific blog for the specific product. DAP can support multiple blogs on one site, so that’ll work fine.

4) Since all of your actual products are on one DAP installation, your affiliates can use the same affiliate link for promoting all of your “child” sites. Which means, anyone buying any product across your network, will result in a commission for your affiliate

5) Since all of your users are in one database, email marketing also becomes extremely simple. You can send autoresponders & broadcasts all from within DAP

6) And anyone purchasing any product across your entire network, instantly and automatically becomes a “global” affiliate – which means they can straightaway start promoting any of your web sites. So if your parent site is Parent.com, and you have 3 child sites called childA.com, childB.com and childC.com, then your affiliates’ global affiliate link would be:

http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234

Now if they wanted to promote childA.com, they just use the redirection feature of DAP like this:
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com

Or if they want to point to a specific page on childA, they can do this:
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com/specificpage.php

or
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com/blog/specific-post/

Plus we’re coming up with a “N”-tier affiliate program in 4.0, which will make it even more powerful when you club it with the ‘global’ concept explained above, as every new member becomes a global affiliate, and will also get multi-tiered commissions across ALL purchases across ALL of your child sites.

DAP now supports Coupon codes – which again means your global affiliate will be able to use coupon codes for any product across your network. So the extensions are unlimited, and the possibilities are infinite.

Configuration #2

Summary: There’s only one site – Parent.com. That’s where DAP is installed. All child sites and content for those sites, are created in “sub-folders” on the same Parent.com site.

Parent.com has “dap” in its root folder.

Parent.com/site1/ is a blog for Site 1 which has all of the content for whatever is being sold on Site 1. Sales page can be the root of the “site1” blog itself, or in a separate WordPress Page on that blog.

So you will have one blog per site, each installed as a separate WP installation, in sub-folders of Parent.com.

Parent.com/site1/
Parent.com/site2/
Parent.com/site3/
Parent.com/site4/

Each of the above blogs should have their own copy of the “DAP-WP-Livelinks” plugin.

But only one installation of the “dap” folder itself. DAP is in root.

Parent.com/dap/

The blogs must be in sub-folders of the main domain – they may not be in sub-domains.

So, in a nutshell…

• DAP enables to you have one, large, global “store”.
• This is also your content and affiliate hub, while unifying and standardizing content delivery for all of your products,
• This gives your members a “Single Sign-on” facility, where if they log in to your “Hub Store”, they basically never have to log in again
• All of the content can be made available from one “Content Delivery” site
• Your affiliate program goes “Global” – which means if you’re an affiliate for one site, you can promote all sites and all products in the network using just one affiliate link. Which will help you recruit more affiliates, and help get them excited about promoting your network sites.

 

2

Affiliate: DAP vs ClickBank

We are frequently asked, why should someone use DAP’s built-in affiliate program, rather than using ClickBank’s affiliate program.

Here’s the difference in a nutshell.

Advantage: DAP

When you use DAP’s built-in affiliate module, …

1. You don’t have to send your members over to Clickbank to sign up separately for an affiliate account
2. Every member (or buyer)  becomes (at your option, of course) an “automatic” and “instant” affiliate the second they purchase any product or membership level
3. You can do Pay-Per-Lead (can’t do that with CB)
4. You can choose your commission level to whatever you want (CB forces minimum & maximum commission percentages)
5. You control who signs up for your Affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
6. You can kick spammers and abusers out of your affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
7. If you use CB, then every person who arrives at your web site through another CB affiliate’s link, can easily screw the original affiliate, and end up purchasing your product through their own CB affiliate link. But your affiliates can’t screw other affiliates when you use DAP. So DAP helps you protect your affiliates’ commissions. Which means, your affiliates will promote you more happily and aggressively, because they know their commissions are safe.
8. CB is a bad choice of affiliate program in the IM and web-savvy niches, because everyone knows about CB, and everyone knows how to replace your affiliate nickname with theirs, and steal your affiliate’s commissions from right under your nose. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
9. If you use CB, if an affiliate didn’t get credited for a sale you know that they brought in (for whatever reason), there’s no way to manually credit that affiliate for the purchase. Using DAP, you can do this (starting v3.9)
10. You cannot credit or pay affiliates for offline payments with CB. You can do that with DAP (starting v3.9).

Advantage: ClickBank

Of course, you should also be aware of the flip side.

1. CB has a large built-in community of affiliates that you can take advantage of to promote your product (of course, actually finding them and getting them excited enough to promote you is another thing altogether)
2. CB takes care of handling commission payments and refunds and charge-backs – so it is less work for you as the admin.
3. When you use a 3rd party like CB, some affiliates may prefer that, especially if they don’t know you, don’t trust you to make the payments on time, or your site is new (or not popular yet).

Related Reading: Leveraging Multiple Affiliate Networks

 

 

0

Your Host Does Not Support Cron Jobs

Question: You ask what to do if your host does not support cron jobs?

Short answer: You may want to switch your hosting company.

The basic idea of a cron jobs is that it allows you to run scheduled tasks, that run automatically, frequently, silently, in the background, without requiring manual intervention.

DAP uses cron jobs to do things like…

• Send out autoresponder emails
• Send out broadcast emails
• Manage your outgoing queue of emails so that you can stay within your cheap web host’s strict hourly email sending limits
• Process and manage affiliate data & commissions , and
• Do some clean up jobs

Any membership plugin that offers email broadcasts, autoresponders and other bulk tasks, will likely ask you to set up cron jobs for sending out emails. You couldn’t possibly send out an email blast to even 500 members in real time as your browser will timeout.

DAP requires you to set up a cron job to do all of the tasks above.

If yours doesn’t, seriously you have only 2 choices…

1. Stick to your host but lose the ability to use powerful scripts like DAP.
2. Or do the smart thing and move to a better host. There are plenty of good ones out there, and there are a few we recommend highly, and they’re very inexpensive.

14

Instant Affiliate Payments

There are some scripts out there that will allow you to “pay affiliates instantly”.

What this essentially means, is that the “seller email” in your Paypal button, is actually replaced with your affiliate’s Paypal email id. Which means the payment from your buyer is going straight into your affiliate’s Paypal account, not yours.

This means that when your buyer looks at her Paypal account, it does not say payment made to you “John Seller” (you), but to “Joe Affiliate” (your affiliate).

This is a poor business practice on so many levels.

1) Customer bought a product from you. Why is her Paypal account showing that she just made a payment of $97 to “Joe Affiliate”? Your customer is thinking, “Wait a minute… Who the heck is Joe Affiliate? I did not buy anything from any Joe Affiliate. Why is my Paypal account showing that I paid him money? HELP!… Fraud… Paypal Dispute… Scammer… I want a REFUND!”. Well, that’s what we would think too if we bought something from one merchant, and saw the payment going to someone else.

2) What happens when your customer wants a refund? Now you’re going to have to ask Joe Affiliate to return the payment, because you never got it – he did. What if Joe Affiliate doesn’t respond on time? What if he doesn’t return the money on time? What if he doesn’t want to return it at all? Will you hold up your customer’s refund, or are you going to keep paying out of your pocket and “hope” that Joe Affiliate returns your payment to you this time, and not to the buyer, because you have already send the buyer their money back?

So yes, this is just bad for business. Not to forget, looks extremely unprofessional on your part too.

The only way to properly handle instant payments, is by using Paypal’s Adaptive Payments technology, which allows you to do something called “Chained Payments”. And using Chained Payments, your customer always pays YOU first. And you can set up a chain, so that as soon as their payment hits your Paypal account, Paypal in turn will instantly send a money from YOUR account to your AFFILIATE’s account. So Customer pays you, you pay the affiliate. And that’s how it should be.

Anything else will only get you in trouble with Paypal, maybe even get your account banned, piss your customers off, dilute your brand, your reputation may get trashed, and just about everything that is not good for your business could happen.

Now DAP does allow you to instantly ‘credit’ your affiliate’s account with the payment due, but you still have to push a couple of buttons before the affiliate can actually get paid.

And that’s how it’s going to be until we develop support for Paypal Adaptive Payments (which has its own complications, by the way).

What is your take on this? Feel free to leave your comments below.

2

Affiliate Link Chaining

Updated: 09/03/2013

This will be very useful to you if you own multiple DAP-Powered membership sites, and you want your affiliates to set affiliate cookies for multiple DAP sites all at once.

DAP allows your affiliates to set the cookie, and then redirect the visitor to any web site URL they want. That second link could be yet another affiliate link from another DAP site, or any affiliate link for that matter.

This allows your affiliates the ability to drop their affiliate cookie on the visitor’s computer for multiple DAP sites. So if they visitor goes on to buy from any of the “network” sites (all powered by DAP), they will get the credit for the sale.

This article is about setting 2 separate DAP affiliate cookies (from two separate membership sites) with one single user-click.

A Tale Of Two Cookies 🙂

Let’s say you have DAP running on two separate web sites. SiteA.com and SiteB.com

You have someone who is an affiliate on both sites. They have user id 1111 on SiteA.com, and user id 2222 on SiteB.com

So here’s how they can create a link that drops two separate DAP affiliate cookies from two different domains on the visitor’s computer, so the affiliate can get credit for any sales happening on either web site.

• Your affiliate’s link for SiteA.com is http://SiteA.com/dap/a/?a=1111
• Now redirect that to a intermediate auto-redirecting page on any of those two sites (doesn’t matter. So let’s pick SiteA.com. And this redirect page – let’s call it redirect.html – is a simple HTML page with a meta-refresh tag as shown below:<html>
  <head>
  <META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0;URL=http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222“>
  </head>
  </html>
• If you see the URL value in the above text, you’ll see that the above page is basically doing a simple and instant redirect to the 2nd affiliate link – which is http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222
• So the main affiliate link becomes http://SiteA.com/dap/a/?a=1111&p=www.SiteA.com/redirect.html

That’s it!

So basically, here’s what’s happening:

The first affiliate link (with extra redirection at the end)…

http://SiteA.com/dap/a/?a=1111&p=www.SiteA.com/redirect.html

Redirects to…

www.SiteA.com/redirect.html

And redirect.html in turn redirects the visitor to…

http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222

That ends the chain. But if you want to take it further, keep reading.

If you want the final landing page to be say SiteC.com/some-page/ then your HTML code for redirect.html becomes…

<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0;URL=http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222&p=www.SiteC.com/some-page/“>
</head>
</html>

Hope this helps.