Our Progress

Annual Updates

Take an inside look at how we have progressed REC+ and key moments that influence our direction. REC+ has been developed and continuously improved since 2008 with this section added in September 2017.

2024 continued as it had been in 2023 with businesses keenly focus on finding the next level of growth, increasing profitability and capitalising on better operational efficiencies, plus improved customer loyalty and increasing conversion rates.

Many of the new features we introduced have been around more detailed sales intelligence, including greater depth in customer, order and product analysis. This has also been pivotal in helping telesales teams better manage their accounts and identify movers and shakers. Product Managers have also been able to drill further into product lifecycle reports and sales data to measure the effectiveness of their product development efforts. The VIP Club system was also enhanced to allow for automated distributor discount management.

An exciting new innovation has been the introduction of 'dynamic re-pricing' via Google Ads price discounting, which went into trial in July of this year and the results are being closely monitored, especially after an unsuccessful deployment of third-party AI from Upp in 2023 and early 2024.

2023 saw businesses adjust to life after the pandemic online spending boom conjoined with tougher economic conditions: the sharp rise in inflation, higher mortgage interest rates and stagnating UK and European economies. The US painted a better picture with strong growth due to the handouts from the Assistance for American Families and Workers Bill and later in the year the Inflation Reduction Act pumping money into the economy.

For many businesses emphasis switched to maintaining reasonable levels of growth balanced across online and offline channels, and improving profit on the bottom line. This was via maximising existing systems and improving operational efficiencies, focus on marketing spend and returns, better data analysis to inform business decisions as well as seeking greater customer loyalty.

Our efforts mirrored this with much improved data analytics to cover the full advertising and purchasing cycle in a simpler interface, automated customer sales classifications to help Sales teams identify and contact key customers, plus customer portals providing greater product discovery and self service. A new order tracking app also improved customer service and enhanced vehicle search was added for automotive sites.

To improve customer loyalty, we introduced a powerful new VIP Club system to reward customers with automated reminders to prompt additional purchases to maintain their level or move up to the next level, as well as early bird and exclusive products.

For manufacturers, the new Product Lifecycle & Forecast tool and Runners, Repeaters & Strangers reporting provided valuable insights for scheduling workload and allowing procurement teams to order ahead in good time.

Coronavirus cast a long shadow over 2022, but for a different reason. The supposition had been that once more people shifted their buying pattern online it would see an accelerated adoption of internet shopping and just keep growing.

Many retailers expected revenues would continue along the same growth pattern, whereas in practice B2B sales often reverted to 2019 pre-pandemic levels and retail sales grew mainly where strong customer loyalty plans were in place to tempt back these new customers, plus increasing ad spend to drive retention and more new customer acquisition.

Resulting from this, a large part of our focus this year was on maintaining or exceeding those pandemic revenue streams, getting product price position set correctly in the marketplace using our price comparison software and in-built product conversion rate reports, while also focusing on profit and the bottom line.

More features were added to increase customer loyalty and understand deeper shifts in buying patterns with the introduction of product group analysis to figure out the application of products by customers. This led to extending and improving our Report Builder system to sift through lots of data quickly to identify what was delivering growth and where attention was needed to arrest and reverse decline in other areas.

This helped to "know the customer" better, leading to improved outreach programs either by telesales or digital marketing. New personalisation features were also added so that different customer groups could be targeted by geolocation with different messaging and product groups.

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).

Coronavirus dominated the first part of 2020. Our efforts on the marketing front were initially deployed as a war room to monitor what the early effects of the virus and lockdown meant. This quickly switched to help businesses tap into home shopping surges especially in the food, DIY and hobbyist marketplaces with huge rises in revenues for many customers. We introduced a range of extra marketing and conversion features too including facebook and Instagram feeds, in-cart deals, more payment options including klarna, increased shipping service providers, extra email marketing capabilities. Price comparison monitoring was also improved and order analysis increased to get further into the detail of sales drivers and performance.

2019 has been an important year seeing us launch our own REC+ App Store full of useful features and services for our users and introducing Business Intelligence (BI) into the core of the Admin Centre. This recommends key areas where the website can be improved as well as areas where there may be compliance issues. Additionally, Notifications flags up all the user interactions taking place on the site in one place, such as form enquiries, new orders, product reviews, new testimonials. For businesses, BI will lead you through a process of continuous improvement, better conversion and reducing risks from lack of compliance.

2018 kicked off with us focusing on making changes to help businesses manage their GDPR compliance and the beta launch of our price tracking app (apply here). New features included the introduction of the Module system, Paypal Credit, improvements to the checkout process, security updates, as well as releasing further self-help articles for our clients, such as 50+ tips for conversion optimisation and 7-step Guide To Measuring & Improving Your Marketing, Sales & Conversions.

"We welcomed on board 30 new clients in 2017 and pushed out 17 new feature releases, all fully tested and documented prior to automatic release across all sites via our overnight updates. This has ranged from the introduction of gift vouchers for retailers to a major re-engineering of our email system, Email Manager, to bring it to the same level of usability as other leading platforms whilst also integrating into lower cost Email Service Providers like Mailgun and pushing Prospect Manager out to selected beta users. We've also been moving sites across to HTTPS in line with industry-wide migrations, as well as encouraging those remaining users to update to fully mobile-friendly sites."

Prospect Manager has had big new features added as part of its ongoing development drive, moving it from beta to general availability. This includes performance dashboards for sales agents, team leaders and sales managers; plus notifications when prospects open emails to read quotes, meaning agents know exactly when they move deeper into the sales funnel.

As part of our product roadmap to enable REC+ to provide core lead management functionality found in systems like Hubspot and the more recent upstart Sharpspring, we embarked on a total rewrite of our Email Manager module to make it as usable as Mailchimp - or better! This ended up being a much bigger task than we first envisaged, but the end result was an easy-to-use UI to at least match Mailchimp combined with integration into Mailgun and AWS. This last part provided an important commercial benefit to our users because it meant we could offer high volume email sending with around 40% reductions in costs compared to Mailchimp and other providers.

HTTPS enables the secure transmission of data over the internet from a computer to any website, including WiFi hot spots. Sites running on HTTPS have an SSL certificate and a visible green padlock in their browser to show the connection is secure. It helps stop criminals stealing valuable data that could be used for spamming or stealing identities entered via forms, such as logging in to a site, making a purchase or subscribing to newsletters.