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.
