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New in REC+: Akismet Anti-spam rollout, region based tax rules & more

Our latest issue of New in REC+ brings several new spam blocking improvements & new region-based tax settings to handle US Economic Nexus rules. Lets dive right in.

Highlights

  • Akismet, the powerhouse spam blocker, has now been rolled out greatly improving our blocking of spam form responses to your site. Whilst this is a paid service, we have included it for free in your regular subscription.
    No settings required, this is now live on all sites.
  • Region-based VAT rules, helping support US Economic Nexus laws
    You can now set individual tax rates on regions, rather than using the main tax rate in site settsings, which then applies to users in that region. This helps towards meeting the new tax laws introduced in the US. For full compliance in this complex area, contact us about using TaxJar integration.
    New VAT region rules can be enabled in: Site Settings > Prices & VAT > VAT Rates "Use region based VAT rates?"
    Go to Delivery Manager > View Delivery Region > find the region to change > Edit 
    Tick " Is this region within your VAT-able zone?"
    Set the tax rate for the region in "Override VAT Rates?" > VAT Rate field
    NB This currently calculates whether to use Billing or Delivery address based on the setting in "Calculate VAT based on Delivery Address rather than Billing Address". If you wish to apply a mix of Nexus rules using delivery AND billing addresses, please contact us.
  • Require region select now allows multiple countries
    Sometimes users forget to select their region/county/state in their billing or delivery countries which can lead to incorrect delivery rates. With this new improvement you can now require users, in any of the selected countries, to select their region. 
    Available in: Settings > General > "Force Users to Select a County for a Specific Countries" now supports selecting multiple countries.

Improvements

  • Product code search now available in the Users Making Purchases report
    Looking to see users buying or thinking about buying high value items, you can now search for multiple product codes (comma separated) when generating the users making purchases report.
    Use Case: You could use this to see which users were interested in certain products (e.g. high value products, new additions to a range, products on offer) but didn't complete the purchase (select an Order State of 'abandoned') and then you can follow this up with them.
    Available in: Admin > Reports > Users Making Purchases > Product Code(s)
  • You can now switch displays of the user ID in admin to show their membership code instead.
    Set this in SIte Settings > General > Show Membership Code instead of User ID 
  • Health checks expanded
    We've expanded our internal health checks to make sure all sites have important core settings in place such as correct email & language settings.

Developer

  • Ckeditor no longer removes blank "span" and "i" elements (e.g. allows use of FontAwesome icons)
    This allows you to enter more custom html such as FontAwesome icons, without ckeditor removing/cleaning these away.
  • Content Blocks now support template content by passing a template=true flag
    Continuing to improve our new content blocks feature, as a designer you can now reference template tags for variables etc direct from inside your content blocks. Adding to the flexibility that content blocks offer.

New in REC+: User tags renaming, prospect manager improvements, multiple delivery services integrations & a Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from the REC+ team! This latest issue of New in REC+ has a range of new features that rolled out over the holiday period. 

Highlights

  • User tags can now be renamed & nested tags are now supported via the " > " separator. 
    Useful if you have a large number of tags in a tag group & want to give them a more fine grained hierarchical structure. 
    Check this out in Admin > User Tags.
  • Quick add user within Prospect Manager
    Now when adding a prospect you can quickly add the user at the same time to streamline this process. 
  • Delivery services integration via Postmen.com  (beta)
    With Postmen you can use a wide range of delivery services such as FedEx or DPD to get their live calculated  delivery rates for orders during checkout.
    We'll be talking about this more soon in an upcoming post when it's out of beta. 

Improvements

  • Product code now included in enquiry emails
    This should be already working for you, but may require a change to the html/store/product_info/enquire_form.html.twig if this has been previously overridden. 
  • You can now switch displays of the user ID in admin to show their membership code instead.
    Useful for avoiding any confusion between Membership codes and user IDs for sites who prefer using the membership codes.
    Site Settings > Display > Show Membership Code instead of User ID
  • Order Items in the Order Confirmation Email is now templatable
    This allows you greater control over the emails that go out to your users & how items are listed in these emails.
    The new template file is available in: /html/email/order_details.html.twig
  • Form messages marked as spam now record the reason we marked them as spam. 
    Possible reasons include: blocked / Russian spam addresses, common spam message phrases & more. 
    Admin > Form Builder > Form Replies > View Spam Folder > New column showing "Spam Reason"
  • Checkout & PayPal warnings now display better to users & are fully logged on the order history.
    More descriptive warnings are now given to users if PayPal declines payment. 
    If a customer has any warning shown to them at checkout, this will now be shown in the order history.

Developer

  • Clear the cart fast in JS with REC.Cart.emptyCart()
    This allows you to programmatically refresh the cart, useful in custom add-to-cart processes to start a new cart. 

Behind the scenes

  • New security improvements
    Fixes & improvements continue to be automatically rolled out to all our sites each night. 
  • Admin side CDN fallbacks
    We use a CDN for many assets in the admin side to speed up this area, however over the holiday period the CDN we use for some assets in the admin side had some downtime, causing a couple areas in Admin to not function. 
    This new release allows us to circumvent the CDN if it is down and the admin area will continue to work without interruption. 

 


A Happy & Prosperous 2019

A Happy New Year to all our customers and a prosperous 2019!

As always, the team at Wildfire will be working diligently to improve and enhance REC+ functionality, security and performance this year and will continue to keep you posted of new features via our Updates blog page.

Getting the essentials right in 2019

Here's some of our perennial recommendations for your site to ensure you start the New Year off on a good footing:

  • Ensure your site works well on mobile devices (contact Areca Design on 01386 570360 if you want to go mobile or are looking for a refresh)
  • Run your site under HTTPS for secure transmission of data over the internet (and get a slight SEO reward from Google)
  • Comply with the GDPR (we have helped a number of clients achieve this so contact us to book yourself in)
  • Commit to ongoing conversion optimisation (see tips for online retailers) and better tracking and management reporting (tips for all sites)

Need help getting more business?

We can assist you in making improvements via our Marketing specialists, as well as running digital marketing campaigns, simply contact your account manager for more information and pricing. This includes services for ecommerce product marketing and promoting local services.

Stop Press: The Russians are at it again...

We fight an ongoing battle to stop spam getting through to your site contact forms including registration and logins. A significant volume has been coming from Russian email addresses and we have acted throughout 2018 to widen spam protection against new methods deployed by the spammers. We are now going even further and employing new systems to counter this using large scale services from Stop Forum Spam and Akisnet. Hopefully this will help keep spam to a minimum.

Best wishes and a prosperous 2019!


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