Christmas Support
As usual, we only provide technical support over the Christmas period, namely server and uptime monitoring, starting Christmas Eve. Regular advice, support and project services will be resumed at 9am on Tuesday 4th January.
Please log any calls on our ticket system during this period.
The Year In Review - Multistore, Integrations , Marketing & Reporting, Price Comparison & Technology Stack Upgrades
Coronavirus continued to affect the economy and drive heightened online spending for home shopping, food, DIY and hobbyist marketplaces. We continued to introduce / update / deploy a range of marketing and conversion features including product bundles, product addons, in-cart deals, email tasks and campaign management and scheduling.
As part of our multi-year investment in technology, a great deal of time and effort went into the meticulous planning for upgrading our entire technology stack, from the servers upwards, to ensure performant load speeds, good page experience metrics and swift running of administrative backend tasks. The upgrade was completed in September without issue.
In terms of compliance, we introduced EU IOSS support, handling mixed VAT rates on product bundles and GDPR tweaks for cookie usage and styling.
Integrations continued to dominate including Multistore replication across multiple sites and identifying differences applied locally to the master store, integration into Unleashed and Xero, plus integration with Tradebox extended to include Xero (without Unleashed).
Other integrations / exports included:
Google My Business, Google & facebook ads customer match, adding LloydsBank cardnet payment support, twitter API update.
Another major development was the release of Report Builder, easily allowing comprehensive executive management reports to be generated from a wide range of metrics. which included adding 'user smart types' for handling multiple groups of similar customers.
Work continued on improving our Price comparison monitoring tool to help businesses understand their price position in the marketplace and set the right pricing policies.
Our HTTPS Checker app was also maintained and remains in regular use worldwide by all sizes of organisations.
And last but by no means least, Wildfire Internet became 'climate positive' working with ecologi to offset carbon emissions whilst also taking other positive steps to actively eliminate emissions.
Looking Ahead To 2022
Next year will continue to provide both opportunities for online retailers to continue growing - after all the pandemic period provided many new customers who can potentially repeat buy - as well as continuing challenges around the economy with ongoing lockdowns, inflation, cost-of-living increases, large-scale job changes (dubbed 'The Great Resignation'). For international traders, there will remain currency headwinds and EU trading difficulties on the one hand, but opportunities to expand into other non-EU areasas Britain goes global.
From a software and services perspective, our efforts will be on the effects of changing privacy on the web, bringing out more marketing features, personalisation and AI, plus providing even more meaningful and actionable data insights to assist businesses with their growth and profitability.
And Finally...
Thanks for using our services, we wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!