New Blog
Welcome to our new blog on REC+
To read all prior REC+ releases going back over 5 years, please visit our knowldege centre
Welcome to our new blog on REC+
To read all prior REC+ releases going back over 5 years, please visit our knowldege centre
CHANGES IN BRIEF
Available 1st November 2017
A number of small changes have been introduced in ecommerce with product re-ordering and the Google product feed, a "form fade" effect when forms are completed plus making it easier to enter an ID for a user to identify them in your accounts system.
Read all about the changes on Freshdesk
REMINDER TO REC USERS
Remember to upgrade to REC+ to access all features, while the upgrade is currently free. You do this in admin by clicking the link to upgrade to REC+ in the top left hand side of the admin screen.
NB Separate charges may apply when using extra modules such as bulk email and Prospect Manager.
STILL TO MIGRATE TO HTTPS?
We strongly recommend that you migrate to HTTPS. See our previous post for full details.
We have introduced a new Invite system, helpful management reports on pages and products and extended the session cookie.
Read full details and setup instructions on freshdesk
Invite System
The Invite system can be used to send out emails to invite people to use your site. This allows them to accept the invite and set up their own password.
Top Pages Report
This displays the top 100 most viewed pages on your website.
Top Products Report
View your top 500 most popular selling products with the facility to select by specific categories or brands.
Top Manufacturers (aka Brands) / Top Categories Report
View sales grouped by manufacturer / brand to see which brands are most popular, or by category for your most popular categories.
Revenue Sources & Form Responses
Available for marketing clients to view the different sources driving revenues or replies to your forms, directing you to the detailed information on the Marketing Console.
Session Cookie Change
We have changed the session cookie so that users can now see their incomplete shopping cart baskets for up to 30 days after they have closed the browser. This will help to increase conversion rates for returning users who abandoned the shopping process and can still see the products in their baskets when opening a new session.
Read full details and setup instructions on freshdesk.
These new features are available in REC+, remember to click on the top right link in the header to upgrade for free currently. Charges will apply in the future!
VIEW VISITOR ACTIVITY IN PAGE MANAGER
You can now see a 30-day activity graphline in Page Manager against individual pages so you can see which pages are being viewed the most, with the exact visitor numbers appearing when you hover over the graphline. This data appears when you have connected your website to your Google Analytics account. This is useful to see at-a-glance where you have the most activity and any spikes in visitor traffic across your site.
REMINDER TO REC USERS
Remember to upgrade to REC+ to access all features, while the upgrade is currently free. You do this in admin by clicking the link to upgrade to REC+ in the top left hand side of the admin screen.
NB Separate charges may apply when using extra modules such as bulk email and Prospect Manager.
STILL TO MIGRATE TO HTTPS?
We strongly recommend that you migrate to HTTPS. See our previous post for full details.
We have introduced a number of enhancements including Weekly Tips to help admins with your conversion optimisation program, being able to email by user tags so you can precisely segment who receives your campaigns and you can now connect to Google Tag Manager to make it easier to insert 3rd party tracking code. In ecommerce, you can add meta data on Manufacturer records for improved SEO and Order Manager has improved sorting to complement the recent release of 30-day session cookies. There's a minor tweak in Download Manager to allow you to drag and drop the download file in without needing to click to upload it. For Prospect Manager users, we have now made it easier to roll forward a reminder with some pre-set links to add an hour, a day etc, plus you can now create a prospect directly from a form created in Forms & Processes. There's also a small feature to disable a dropdown option temporarily on a form by adding a '-' in front of the drop down text. These enhancements are available on either 26th or 30th January.
Available Tuesday 6th February 2018
You now have the ability to enter an email signature on admin user records (in this case you'd be using it for sales agents) and have this displayed within the emails you send via Prospect Manager by adding in the tag {{ email_signature }} to the "email quote" system page.
Membership number (often renamed to Account ID via site defines) now appears on the main user record and prospect activity record which saves having to look it up.
The "value" field displayed in the email message will be suppressed if the value is zero (tip: remember to remove the preceding text which is normally just the word 'Value".
We are excited to announce the release of Version 7 and the Module system which is now available to REC+ users. This brings a new method of creating and displaying custom content and optionally displaying the data on web pages with full design control for web developers. In this way you can use a single design style to create unique pages with their own URL's and content plus tagging and filtering, all populated from a database table you define yourself.
On the fun end, you can create polls and make better looking team pages. Or maybe you want to publish web pages containing detailed recipes, technical FAQ's with lots of data fields, case studies or knowledge articles - all nicely styled the way you want. You could also store your business data in the site which only admins can view and edit, such as audit reports, project tasks, approved supplier lists, purchase authorisations and more.
We have provided documentation on Freshdesk on how it works. Due to the bespoke nature of custom content, all implementation, support and training is chargeable time.
Applies To: Ecommerce Sites Taking Standard Paypal Payments Through The Checkout Process
Does Not Apply To: Paypal Encrypted and Paypal Express methods, or Form payments
We have recently received a few reports where a small number of users paying via the standard Paypal method have had an issue completing the payment process. This does not apply to your site if you instead use the Paypal Encrypted and Paypal Express payment methods, or you are taking payments via a form rather then the normal checkout process.
This is a small, random problem which we cannot recreate and Paypal cannot offer an explanation why it has occasionally occurred. We therefore recommend you consider moving to Paypal Express which has not had any reported issues and also offers a much smoother and faster checkout process for the user as an added benefit.
How Do I Know If I Am On Standard Paypal Payments?
Go into Payment Processors Manager and see if "Paypal Or Credit Cards" is set to a Status of "on" and Mode of "live". If it is then we recommend you migrate to Paypal Express.
How Do I Update To Paypal Express Checkout?
Follow this article on Freshdesk
Test!
Make sure you test your changes by successfully putting an order though the checkout process using the Express Checkout method you have set up.
We have been working hard to ensure the REC platform complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into force on 25th May 2018. This is a heads up about the changes we will be releasing next Tuesday 24th April which will enable you to take many of the necessary steps to ensure you are compliant.
New Cookie Message
A newly-worded cookie message and layout will be displayed to first-time visitors in place of the existing message. The new message will inherit the colour schemes of your site if you have adapted it.
New Cookie Pop-up (for responsive design websites)
When the Cookie Settings link is cliked it will fire up a modal window giving the visitor the ability to manage which cookies they wish to allow, as required under GDPR. A version of this will be made available for non-responsive websites at a later date.
Positive Opt-in Consent For Newsletters / Email Campaigns
The system will cater for positive opt-in consent to newsletters where the individual will have to tick a box to be added as a newsletter subscriber, rather than it being pre-ticked for them.
Re-permissioning For Email Campaigns
A re-permissioning process has been defined to include a program for bulk unsubscribes and a new "Subscribe" field which can be added to email templates to allow people to opt-in to future marketing emails.
Form Data Collection Tips
This enables you to add some explainer text on form fields to explain why you wish to collect that particular data.
Users Can See Their Form Submissions
Users will be able to see what forms they submitted on your site when they log in to their User Home page.
Additional Auditing
The audit log will keep a record of when users are added to the system and when there are changes to their newsletter subscription, status, level and group. This will help administrators to see what has happened historically as part of complying with individuals' rights to restrict processing or to be forgotten.
We will be providing guidance on the steps you need to take to use these new features when the release is made available next week.
There will be further releases before the 25th May which are more targeted towards alerts and notifications when administrators access private data. This is part of extending the perimeter for data breach detection because many data breaches originate from inside a company rather than being external website hacks.
The checkout process has been updated to enhance the user experience on the checkout page and the code has been generally improved.
This is a notification that the change comes into effect on Wednesday 25th April 2018.
GDPR Is Now Live!
Find out what you need to know to set up and implement the changes required to make your website GDPR compliant before 25th May 2018.
Features added on 22nd May include making Cookie Manager available to non-responsive design sites and allowing the Subscribe link to work with Mailgun integration and showing 3rd party domains correctly in the non-essential section of the cookie pop-up. All users are being asked to sign our latest terms and conditions which include GDPR updates mainly in the form of the new Data Processing Agreement.
Read all features and how to implement them here
You also have access to our full GDPR section which includes how to run processes that help you comply.
Do You Need Help WIth Your GDPR Website Compliance?
We are helping users to achieve compliance on their websites by performing cookie audits, form reviews and updates to cookie and privacy notices. These typically take around 3 hours and are charged at £75+VAT per hour or part thereof. Book your site in for GDPR via a freshdesk ticket.
Filter Users By Subscriber allows you to select your users in User Manager > Filter Users by whether or not they have subscribed to your newsletters. You can then assign selected users into specific user groups (1,2,3 refer to the groups shown on a user record) which you may want to do for segmentation and emailing purposes. NB Email Manager will not send to users who are not marked as subscribed.
Filter Users who are ungrouped allows you to find users who have been entered without being assigned into a group, so you can quickly identify them and then add them into the desired group.
Script Finder is a new program which allows you to scan areas of the website to find scripts that have been embedded in the site, such as 3rd party apps or tracking which may introduce cookies and therefore you need to be able to turn off those scripts in conjunction with Cookie Manager.
Combating Form Spam. There has been a recent sharp increase in spam, some of which is by-passing Google Captcha, in particular from Russia. We have introduced our new Intelligent Spam Filter to help combat this. In the most obvious spam cases, when the spammer has wasted their time submitting the form we will automatically reject it without their knowledge. For other possible spam items, we will place them in the spam folder of the corresponding form in Forms & Processes.
Google Products Variation Manager. This has been renamed from 'Multi Ad Generator' and you can export your product feed data to a CSV file, modify it with any alterations you need, then import it via the Import System, selecting Google Products GTINs in step 2. The reason this change was introduced was to help the situation where products are set up with multiple options and each one needs its own GTIN (in this case for clothing that had a GTIN for each size/colour combination).
REC+ Version Numbering. Because we are rolling out continuous product updates we will no longer be displaying version numbers in REC+. Our team works on the software every day of the week keeping it up to date with security updates, software patches and enhacements. The updates are automatically rolled out overnight to all sites, meaning your software is always on the very latest version available. NB If you are an REC user then remember to switch to REC+ for free currently in your admin console!
Under GDPR registered users can object to having their data processed. In REC+ this means restricting processing via Email Manager (so the user won't be included on emails) and in User Manager and Prospect Manager a red warning message is displayed when you select the user advising:
"Restricted User
This user has been restricted from processing under GDPR, please do not contact them or process their data."
To mark a user as restricted go into User Manager > select their user record > Status & Levels tab > tick the field 'Restricted User'.
In this issue of REC developments we have a number of fantastic new features to help run your website, let's take a look:
In this weeks issue we focus on smaller day to day improvements, let's dive in:
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:
If you're a service business looking to promote your services in your local area, we can help you find more customers!
Our Google My Business service will increase customer enquiries by increasing exposure in Google Maps, Reviews and Search Results pages.
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:
This week's issue brings you spam protection improvements, new ways to build up blocks of content on your site & more! Let's dive in:
As usual, we only provide technical support over the Christmas period, namely server and uptime monitoring, starting 4pm on Friday 21st December.
Regular advice, support and project services will be resumed at 9am on Wednesday 2nd January.
Please log any calls on our ticket system as the office will be unmanned for this period.
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:
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!
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.
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.
In this week's issue of New in REC+, we highlight the extra anti-spam layers we have introduced for combating spam bots leaving comments on forms, which has been spreading to registration, login & search forms. We have also made other improvements including adding Stripe for form payments and improving the login and re-ordering processes.
To recap, we previously introducing Akismet's filtering system on all sites and extended our own internal blocking techniques to stop spam comments being left. We have now gone a step further by introducing the StopForumSpam.com service to identify and block known bad actors from submitting spam.
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