Last week we had the Chrome Developer Summit, check out our rundown of the most important features here & let's dive into what's new in REC:

Highlights

• Ability to hide the checkout delivery address if it's the same as the billing address:
  On the checkout confirm screen you can have the delivery address hidden if it's the same as the billing address.
  This is an optional display change you can use to help clean up the layout of the checkout. 
  Available in Settings > Ecommerce > Checkout > "Hide delivery address if it's the same as the billing on Checkout"
• Twitter cards large image support:
  Similar to the social share image Facebook & other social networks use, Twitter also support sending them a larger version of the image to be used when a link to your site is shared.
  Available in Settings > Company > Site Images > Twitter Cards > "Enable Twitter Cards" switch & "Twitter Card Large Image" uploader.
• Paypal express 'in context' buttons are now automatically tracked in Google Analytics
  Monitoring the effectiveness of buttons on your site is important and you can now automatically monitor which of your paypal buttons are clicked under Events > PayPal Buttons in Google Analytics. 
• Addon products
  If you have products such as setup charges or similar services that you don't want showing up in best seller, latest products & other lists & you don't want them to show in the abandonment emails then this new setting can help.
  Available in: Add product > Extra > Is this an addon product? As well as on: Edit product > Prices & delivery tab > Is this an addon product?
• Form replies source/medium tracking.
  You can now track which sources bring in the most form replies in the Form
  Available in Forms & Processes > View form replies > new Medium/Source column & there's a new Medium & Source columns in the CSV
• Form replies improvements
  In response to your feedback we've made a few useful improvements to the Form replies area including moving the export to the top so you can get to the data faster as well as making replies now sorted by newest first instead of by unread.
• Users API improvements
  The users API events for updates now include unsubscribes as well as supporting the GDPR "is_restricted_user" field in user api responses.

Security Improvements

• SRI on CDN scripts
  SubResource Integrity provides a little extra protection when we reference scripts on 3rd party sites.
  This now covers all the default CDN js files we use so that if ever they were hacked and the hacker poisoned these files, the integrity check would instead request a trustworthy local version of the file instead.
  Using this method, the site still functions without using the CDN & the user is still safe.  
• Secure & SameSite Cookies experiment
  Secure cookies make sure that they are only loaded over HTTPS, while SameSite cookies make sure they are only used when in the context of this site, adding an additional level of protection to the session cookies used on your site. 
  Available in Settings > Security > "Use Secure & SameSite Cookies - Experimental!"

Black Friday Offer if you require Local Marketing

Each year Google run a Chrome Developer Summit for a couple days highlighting what they've been working on in Chrome & what's available back to us as designers & developers.

One big takeaway … Continue Reading »

With Black Friday fast approaching, in this week's issue we've introduced a useful new feature to help boost your sales, as well as other tweaks and improvements to the system and some helpful hints: 

Highlights

• Coupons can now trigger FREE DELIVERY!
  With Black Friday on the horizon, you can now offer free delivery to customers with this new type of coupon.
  You can narrow it down to just a specific delivery zone such as UK only & gain all the normal coupon controls over this including date ranges, maximum number of uses & more.
  Available in Coupon Manager > add/edit Coupon > under "How much is this coupon worth?" it now gives the a tickbox option against the question: "Or do you want this coupon to trigger Free Delivery?".
• Stress testing REC+
  With big sales come big traffic spikes! We've been working with load testing tools more lately to stress test REC+ to it's limits to identify and optimise areas that could be affected by extremely large volumes of traffic. A deep dive article will follow on this soon. This is all part of ongoing improvements and monitoring of the core infrastructure and REC+ application performance.

Tweaks & Improvements

• Improvements to email delivery
  Further improvements have been made so Sender & Return-Path addresses can always be the system address, which you can also now override. 
  This lets you be receive form reply emails from the visitors email, even through the sender address behind the scenes is actually still the system, which then prevents any SPF issues. 
• Further improvements to order manager
  We have been delighted to introduce further improvements to Order Manager, after receiving a lot of useful feedback from you. Thanks.

Did you know...

• Email marketing reports
  A somewhat hidden away feature of our Email manager system is reports on not only who read & clicked the emails, but also how many form replies & orders came from the campaign. 
  You can find these in Email Manager > View Sent Emails > Click the email you'd like to see > Check out the Ecommerce & Form Responses tabs.
• Coupon usage reports
  From inside coupon manager you can click the Report link between Edit & Delete to find a detailed report of orders that used the coupon, top products it was used on and more. 
• & more useful reports!
  Remember there are a number of helpful reports to assist you in measuring the success of your Black Friday campaigns, as well as planning which products & categories to run offers on. These include: Top Products Report, Top Brand/Category Report, Top Pages Report & your Revenue Sources report.
  Available in the Reports system in Admin.

In this weeks issue we focus on smaller day to day improvements, let's dive in:

Highlights

• PDF downloads for Invoices.
  You can now download order invoices directly from order manager as PDFs.
  Available in Order Manager > Orders > "PDF Invoice" button under the summary details.
  This uses the design of your print invoice which is also available to customise in Templates > select the active template > html/invoice/base.html.twig
• Further order manager improvements.
  Continuing from last week we've made further improvements to the flow of the new order management screen based on the feedback we've had so far from you. If you've switched to the old version, please consider trialing the new order experience again to see the latest changes. Your feedback is always welcome. 
• Mobile touch icon.
  On mobile devices this is shown when adding to favorites, bookmarks & adding to the home screen (similar to favicons). 
  We automatically create scaled down versions of your mobile touch icon for the most popular different mobile browsers. 
  Available in Site Settings > Company > Company Details > Mobile Touch Icon.
  Recommended size: at least 200x200px & must be a square image.
• Social Sharing Image.
  Ever shared your site and wondered why Facebook / Twitter / Instagram used a specific image? This change let's you have more control over this by setting a default image for sharing. This image applies to all main pages of your site, while blog & product pages still use their main images by default. 
  Available in Site Settings > Company > Company Details > Social Sharing Image
  Recommended size: 600x315px or 1200x630px.
  You can test with Facebook's Sharing Debugger tool.

Tweaks & Improvements

• Rename delivery countries 
  Though you can rename countries in the system already, this would lead to issues with existing data in the system.
  An example of this would be renaming UK to UK Mainland to seperate out Islands for delivery rules.
  To resolve this, we've added a new "Country display name" feature to delivery regions letting you set a different name for countries to appear as. 
  When setting this, please make sure you set all the relevant regions for that country. 
  Available in Delivery Manager > View Delivery Regions > Edit delivery methods, set "Country Display Name".
• Form sign up process now supports updating existing users
  Previously the sign up process on forms would only subscribe new users, and if a user had unsubscribed they'd need to resubscribe from their account page.
  Now existing users who have unsubscribed can resubscribe on sign up forms easily through the form they originally subscribed through. 
• Email deliverability improvements.
  Continuing our work to prevent emails going to spam, we've made further changes to the FROM addresses we use on all admin notifications.
  Follow the full guide on better email deliverability & troubleshooting here.
• HTTPS additional domain redirects
  Multiple domains pointed at a single IP doesn't work with HTTPS, but you can redirect to the main domain from these additional domains. 
  Previously this meant also setting up HTTPS for the other domain due to how the HTTPS connections happen prior to redirects.  
  We've now introduced a way to have HTTPS enabled redirects setup for any addition domains you might have that you want redirected to your main site.
  Please contact us if you need one of these enabled for your site with the domain name(s) you'd like to have redirected.  
• Facebook Analytics.
  Similar to Google Analytics, Facebook offer their own form of analytics.
  Available in Connect > Social > Facebook Analytics, app id can be set here and then you can enable the js tracking too.
  You can set this up in Facebook:
  https://developers.facebook.com/apps/ > "+ Add a New App", setting the name to your domain name & any contact email.
  App ID given at the top of the screen, click to copy it and paste over in REC > Connect > Social > Facebook Insights APP ID.
  Under "Analytics" click "Set Up", then click "Web".
  Click "I already set up the Javascript SDK" & skip adding the code as REC handles this for you.
  Enter your Site URL, click Save & then Continue, then skip through the remaining steps by clicking Next on each screen.
  Last screen leaves you on there so now you can click to view your Analytics.

Designers & Developers

• Users API can now accept delivery prices with or without VAT set
  You can set custom delivery prices (when enabled) on user records & the API can now handle this with a way to set if you're passing a VAT / non-VAT price.
  In the Users API, you can send the following against each user: "delivery_charges": {  "default": "", "free_threshold": "" },
  we assume VAT prices by default but pass the "use_non_vat_prices" URL param.
• WebP & SVG images support.
  We now support images throughout the system for Google's WebP image format & as SVG.
  With SVG please optimize the images before uploading them to the site & when using WebP please be mindful of browser support as this is a new format. 
  Available throughout the system such as product/blog images as well as logos and all other image uploads.
• Mailchimp Upgrade.
  Keeping up with the latest Mailchimp upgrade, all users should be able to be synced once again.
• SMTP email debugging.
  If you're having issues sending emails through SMTP you can get full debug logs.
  This new area is available at the bottom of SMTP Settings section in Admin.