Creating a Tangible Good Product

Creating a tangible good product is straight forward. Its part of the Add New Product wizard.  After picking your storefront, just select Tangible Good. Tangible Goods require a cart based payment processor; Paypal and Google Checkout are currently supported.

Once you get there, you'll want to configure your product as you normally would.  Enter an appropriate name, description, upload a photo and set your default price.  You'll notice that Collect Address is now required, and you have a Quantities Option.  Check Quantities if you want to allow multiples of your product to be sold.

There is a set of options that are specific to tangible goods. You can find these at the bottom of the edit product page.

Product Weight is especially important if you plan on charging shipping. DPD does not calculate shipping for you, but it will provide all of the information necessary for your payment processor to do it. Weight is one of those fields that your payment processor will need.

Quantity on Hand and Allow Backorders allow you to do simple inventory tracking. Enter the amount of stock of your product you have on hand into the Quantity on Hand field.  Every time you have a completed sale, DPD will subtract the quantity of the sale from the quantity you have on hand. Allow Backorders is enabled by default and will allow you to continue selling after you've run out of inventory.  If you wish to prevent sales once you've run out of inventory, uncheck this box and DPD will let the user know that you are temporarily out of stock when you run out.

Shipping your Products

When you make new sales of tangible goods, you'll need to ship them. The best way to know what to ship is to go to your Purchases page.

The purchase page is color coded and each purchase has icons that give you an overview of what is going on. Green rows indicate a completed sale.  Gray rows indicate a sale that is pending or abandoned.  Yellow indicates that you've charged your customer, but you need to do something to complete the sale. The icons are there to let you know of the content of the sale - tangible, digital, or keycode and the status of each. An icon under the Address column indicates that you have an address on file for the customer.

When you are ready to start shipping, select the Needs Shipping checkbox and click Apply Filters.  This will show you all of your sales that you need to ship products to. Click on each purchase order and go to the the purchase page.

On the purchase page, you'll see an overview of the sale and a list of all of the products in the purchase.  If you'd like to package an invoice with your shipment, click the Print Invoice button. When you're ready to ship, click Mark Order as Shipped.

The Mark as Shipped page has all of the information you need to ship your products. You will need to use the shipment method that your customer selected to ship your products.  The method name for the shipment method comes directly from your payment processor.  It'll be one of the methods you set up with Paypal or Google Checkout to use for shipping options.

Create your label using the Ship To information, and package all of your products with the specified quantities.  If your carrier provides a tracking number, enter that into the form. Apply your label to the package and click click the "Mark All Items Shipped". DPD will automatically inform Google Checkout that the product is shipped and Google Checkout will send an email to your customer with the tracking information if available. 

For other processors that don't support the shipment notifications, you should check the box Send Shipment Email and DPD will send the email for you. After shipment, you may want to log into your processor and mark it shipped with them as well.

DPD lets you customize your shipment notification email.  Just click on Your Products, and then the Look and Feel button for your website.