SmartDD v3 Features
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I know it's been a long time in coming, but SmartDD v3 is ready to release apart from the docs.
I've been using it on a couple of sites, and although I haven't used every new feature in earnest, everything has been tested to my satisfaction. Even so, I guess we'll find a couple of minor bugs here and there which we'll fix as we go.
New stuff then.
o Kunaki integration with BOTH your web sites AND eBay. No need to run two scripts, SmartDD will do it all for you.
In case you don't know what Kunaki is, it's a global Print On Demand (POD) service for CDs and DVDs. Customers can buy from you anywhere in the world, and SmartDD will handle the sale and pass the creation and fulfillment onto Kunaki, who then send your customer the CD or DVD.
o Free sign up. In response to many requests, we've added the ability to offer a product on a secure download page in return for a sign up to your mailing list. The built in example is for Aweber, but you can use it with any self-hosted or service based autoresponder.
o One Time Offers. Now you can sell a digital item via your web store or eBay, and then upsell via the use of a one time offer (OTO). An OTO is a method whereby the prospective buyer sees a reduced price for just one time. If they pass on the offer, then they will only ever get to see it at its full price afterwards.
You can of course use this in conjunction with a free sign up. 
o Affiliate scheme. We've added in a simple affiliate scheme in the format of:-
http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/?e=PayPalEmailAddress
for any percentage commission, 0-100, variable by saleable item. Even at 100% the admin always gets the first commission to prevent people from buying from themselves by using their personal and business accounts.
So if you created a saleable item at 100% commission, and an OTO item at 50% commission, the admin would get the full amount of the first sale for both items. Thereafter, the affiliate would get all of the sales for the first item, and the sales of every other item paid directly into their PayPal account.
Affiliate cookies work across all products for an installation of SmartDD. So if you've created a sales page for one item and your affiliate sends traffic to it, then the prospect buys something else from you, your affiliate gets the credit for that purchase too.
You can set by saleable item that only customers can be affiliates (why you'd want to do that I don't know, but some people do), and you can also restrict individual customers from being affiliates.
o Web store. Take almost any web template, and turn it into a completely database driven web store. This was actually in v2, but was never documented. I'm very sorry about that, believe me.
o Physical goods handling enhanced.
o Create a product and an item through a single screen. The normal method of setting SmartDD up is to create your products first, and then link them to a saleable item. If you only have one product though, you can now create the product and the item at the same time.
o Run ALL your sites through one central location. This has always been possible with SmartDD, but we've made it a whole lot better by adding some additional template formats.
o The ability to copy all template types as well as amend and remove. This makes it faster to take an existing template, copy and edit it.
o Three professionally designed built in template themes, courtesy of ECoverPalace.com. One in red, one in green and one in blue. The template designs have been added to all the template formats:-
- Catalogue Templates (web store)
- Cart Templates (web store)
- Download Templates
- Order Confirmation Templates (thank you pages)
- Free Sign Up Templates
- Item / One Time Offer Templates
Additionally, the templates are provided separately so that you can use them to create traditional sales pages, or for your web store.
o Friendly URLs. This aids in SEO of your web store as SmartDD will create search engine friendly URLs for you, based on the category names. You'll need to be running your web site via Apache with mod-rewrite enabled in order to use this. A good old cPanel server will allow you to do this.
o Finally, as usual there have been a lot of "under the hood" and plenty of other small changes all of which combine to make SmartDD the best delivery script on the market.
***
So when is it being released?
Thursday 16th October 3.00pm GMT.
If you purchased the full version (v2) after 1st March 2008 then you'll get the upgrade to v3 for free. Otherwise there will be a 24 hour special for the upgrade at $17. After that it will be $27 – still an amazing bargain if you're upgrading from v2.
And of course lets not forget all the people who've taken a couple of special offers I've made who will get the upgrade for free.Â
-Frank Haywood
Filed under internet business by on Oct 6th, 2008. Comment. 
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Comments on SmartDD v3 Features
Frank,
if I don't find a buy now button on 16th Oct I'll never forgive you!
There's something you said in your new features that opens up a nice little promotional tactic – I hope you'll forgive me for not sharing it here, but it's a rather nice little extra.
Your upgrade pricing is more than fair – I was beginning to worry that it might be a hefty chunk – obviously not.
I'll be waiting on Thursday – don't disappoint me because I know where you live……
Hi Frank,
I think you're underselling smartdd by referring to it merely as a delivery script…it does so much more now.
Love the kunaki support…that's an area I want to get into and now the whole ordering and shipping process is automated, fantastic.
One quick question, is it always the case that on a 50% commission, the affiliate will always have to make two sales and then they get paid in full via paypal on the second one. Or will the script handle paying out 50% of a commission?
Also, any idea when the docs will be available?
Cheers…Graham
Hi Frank
Sounds good! Does this mean that I would be able to do the following:
- Sell an item on ebay as a lead generator for say £9.95 (on disc, and ship via Kunaki if customer is not from UK, or make it and ship it myself if in UK)
- Upon purchase, the customer can be added to a specific Get Response mailing list
- Customer is also redirected to a thank you page or an OTO
- this could then for example be a ten disc set from Kunaki (is this possible with SDD3?)
- I then also invite my new customer or anybody else to promote the product as an affiliate
How does the affiliate program payment work if I offer 30% commissions? 100% to me first still, and then what?
I'd really appreciate your answers to these questions Frank!
All the best
Phil
Sounds GREAT Frank, I've got the dentist at that I think. Or at least around that time, it might be an hour earlier! LOL
I don't think I qualify for the free update, but I'm not sure! – Anyway, speak soon!
Thanks
Mark
I read this waiting for the sting in the tail, it just got better as I read down the page, then I thought here comes the price. Frank, are you after a sainthood? That's not an upgrade for a digital delivery system, that's a whole new on-line business. Cannot wait, drawing up new marketing plans now.
One question is this an upgrade or does it require a new install?
Frank,
What will the price be for those of us that you gave the SmartDDlite version?
Hope it will be good so as to entice us to upgrade.
By the way, have you added the logging of IP addresses for each order?
Frank!
You've really gone all out on delivery extreme value on the "upgrade"! Like Gareth said, it is not an upgrade, but a whole new online business that you're giving us.
I really like the list of new features, but have just one question…
The PayPal integration for affiliates, is it instant Paypal commissions, or do we still need to make a Paypal payment for commissions manually?
Also, does or will SmartDD integrate with Rapid Action Profits (RAP)? I've switched over to RAP due to all the functionality that SmartDD didn't have, but now it looks as if SmartDD might cover all those functions.
Finally, will you allow "plug-in" modules to be designed by outside sources (your user community)? The reason is, as I've seen with RAP development, you can't code one solution for everyone, so it is usefull for the ability to develop plugins that will do other functionality that is not in the core script. For example, the ability to set up Paypal subscriptions, or allowing Affiliates to add their own bonus.
Anyway, I look forward to the new release.
Regards,
Charles Burleigh
Hi Frank!
Good news indeed!
I look forward to SmartDD v.3, and hope the installation instructions will be ready when you release the script?!
I also hope you'll find time to update the
http://www.SmartDD.com website so it will reflect all the new features.
Way to go, Frank!
Cheers,
Jan
WOW! Christmas is coming earlier every year. I can hardly wait to open this 'present'. Thanks Frank, you've just proven, again, that there is a Santa Claus!! See you Thursday…
Ditto what Gareth said… I'm curious too, since the upgrade price is kick-butt.
Yeah, you're definitely going for sainthood, but did you know you were already there in my books?
If I miss the exact date, I hope you have a wonderful, enjoyable, non-computer birthday – it is this month, right?
Hugs across the ocean,
Donna
Amin:
We've tried to make v3 as flexible as possible so that with a little effort you can put together some clever site flows, and use some neat tactics such as offer a freebie, then do an limited offer upsell to a paid item. Just like I do on the SmartDD.com site.
The price we felt was more than fair, maybe in v4 we'll charge a little extra but then we have plans to offer a lot more for the money.
Yeah I know where I live too.
Graham:
Yes, I'll rework the copy a bit and although it *is* still a delivery script, you're right it does a bit more now.
Kunaki are interesting, they prefer to be seen as a machine rather than a company, which is a novel approach. They don't do discounts, they don't negotiate, and they generally don't have any interest in your business at all. You feed them ISOs, money, and addresses, and they deliver.
V3 does alternate payouts directly to PayPal accounts. One to you, one to the affiliate, depending on your percentage commission of course. A 20% commission would give one to you, one to your affiliate, three to you, then one to the affiliate, four to you and repeat. If you don't quite like how it does it, you *could* go messing with the payout table in the database, but it's best to leave things alone I think.
I'm not launching without docs, because I now know from experience that they'll never get done…
Phil:
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.
At 30% it would be something like 1 to you, 1-aff, 2-you, 1-aff, 2-you, 1-aff, 2-you, followed by 1-aff and around. ie your affiliate gets 3 sales and you get 7.
At 31%, it gets a little tricker.
Mark:
No worries, you'll have 24 hours to upgrade at $17, and even then it's only $27 after that.
Gareth:
You know what? You're right. With a little more effort, we could have released it as Site Flow Manager, but we decided enough's enough.
V4 will be even closer to Site Flow Manager, but won't do the most important bits that SFM will become famous for when it's eventually released. That's all I can say on that front.
It's an upgrade from v2 to v3. We've tested it several times and it's always worked without a hitch.
Vince:
I'm afraid there's nothing special planned on that front. Your best bet is to wait and see though. If you can't wait, go for the full version.
On the IP address, no we haven't. Is this important to you? I've never really been that interested in the IP address as I get their name and home or business address instead, which I think is more useful. Most scripts throw that detail away when it comes back from PayPal, I make sure mine retain it.
Charles:
We want you to go "WOW!", grab the upgrade and then tell other people about it. Using your affiliate link of course.
The PayPal commissions are instant. Affiliates like that.
SmartDD won't integrate with other payment scripts. The reason being they'll just fight over who gets the IPN data. Yes we could do IPN forwarding, but many scripts check that the IPN data is coming from PayPal.com as part of the security, or should do anyway (SDD does).
We could work something out, but it can all get a bit messy.
Yes, we've talked about plug-ins, but a slug of work needs to be done first on the plugin functionality. If it's done properly, it can be an enormous job of work to get right.
I also think plugins can be a sideways method of squeezing more money out of the customer for functionality that should be integrated into the product anyway. Unless they're free.
We'll add PayPal subscriptions and simple (basic auth) membership either in v3.x or maybe v4, we're undecided. It depends how big a job it turns out to be.
Jan:
Yes. Everything has to be updated before the 16th otherwise I won't release and Amin will get me.
Vern:
I couldn't live in a world where Santa Claus didn't have a place.
A couple of years ago, my eldest asked me if Father Christmas really did exist, and my honest answer was "I like to think that somewhere out there in a magical place, Santa and his elves work in an enormous toy workshop. I don't want to believe anything else."
He seemed very satisifed with that answer, and I think was mature enough to get that I'd carefully side-stepped his question, and that if his dad was prepared to believe that, then so was he.
Christmas is a BIG deal in our house.
We don't go mad with gifts as we think that can give kids the wrong impression, and we often won't let them have something that we feel isn't right to give to a single child. We don't want them to think that things come easily, and that there has to be some effort involved.
But if they all agree on a single big gift, we'll include it for them to share. Along with their regular gifts of course.
Sorry, I've drifted completely onto Christmas now, but then you did mention Santa!
Donna:
-Frank
P.S. We'll be releasing ClickBank support about a month after v3 release for those people that want it. It'll be an add-on for $10 or something like that, again with a 24 hour special for $5.
Logging IP address can be important to combat fraud, and also aid in some chargebacks from Paypal. Had an order where the Paypal user disputed they placed the order
Hope you reconsider on somekind of deal for subscribers of your blog