Voracio Platform Release Update
Latest Voracio Platform Announcements
You now have the latest version of Voracio - 2024.1.0
We're pleased to announce that the latest version of Voracio has been deployed to your site. This release as always resonates with our commitment to continual platform improvements. Version 2024.1.0 includes module performance boosts, feature upgrades and bug fixes. For merchants using Opayo, this also includes the Opayo URL update.
Keynote to this release is our enhanced featured products and cross selling. Alongside a performance boost you can now Smart Target products within these modules and utilise links with html content to boost your internal link building efforts. Featured products now by default have a quick view and add-to-basket at listing level.
If you'd like to learn more and gain more insights into how to use these advanced features, please get in touch and we can arrange a support session. In addition to this, version 2024.1.0 is also equipped with our advancements in B2B trade facilities which includes trade channel pricing and customer assignment to trade channels. Get in touch to learn more.
Unlocking a myriad of seamless integrations: Announcing the Voracio API
We’re excited to share a forthcoming significant addition to the Voracio platform which will unlock new possibilities for your business. Announcing the Voracio API as part of our 2024 development roadmap. As many of our users have experienced, Voracio is already stacked with integrations, from payment gateways, WMS through to marketing services and more. In anticipation of the Voracio API launch, here’s a taste of the advantages the Voracio API will bring:
Expanded reach
The Voracio API will empower our users to extend their reach across a myriad of platforms, enabling seamless integration with leading ecommerce services.
Evolve & grow with reduced integration costs
Alongside our platform partner, a wealth of connectors and business process automation tools will be made available with reduced integration timescales and costs. As and when your business requirements change, you can scale and integrate with new systems or applications.
Scalability and reliability
Built with scalability at its core, our API and partner integration will provide a cost-effective integration and automation solution that caters for businesses of all sizes.
This exciting project represents our commitment to empowering our clients with the tools and technologies you need to thrive in today's competitive landscape.
Pain Points Relieved. We Are Voracio.
1st March 2024 - Google Consent Mode v2 is here!
Google Consent Mode v2 is now being enforced by Google, this is so that they can meet new data privacy regulations. Read an official Google statement here. In order to preserve performance of campaigns that are showing ads to consumers in the European Economic Area (EEA), web advertisers need to send verifiable consent signal(s) to Google. This needs to be done through a CMP (Consent Management Platform) and the good news is that with our updated CookieBot integration, the Voracio Platform is ready for Google Consent Mode. See more information on an official Cookiebot statement here.
In order to preserve performance of campaigns that are showing ads to consumers in the European Economic Area (EEA), web advertisers need to send verifiable consent signal(s) to Google, without doing so, your ads and analytics will likely see considerable data loss. It remains to be seen just how much data loss may be incurred, however it is clear that personalised advertising features such as remarketing will be severely impacted.
The latest version of Voracio, which will soon be deployed to your site, is ready with the updated CookieBot integration. If you don’t yet have an active and configured account with CookieBot, please contact us urgently. If you do have an active CookieBot account, please contact us to confirm your upgrade.
Voracio Smart Targeting on Listings Now Available: Includes performance boost!
We're excited to share that your website will soon receive an exciting feature upgrade. Introducing Voracio's cutting-edge Smart Targeting feature, now developed for listing pages! With this enhancement, you'll have unparalleled control over your listings. Customise them with precision using dynamic product inclusions and exclusions. You can manually assign products, or use a blend of manual and dynamic criteria for ultimate flexibility. Additionally, we've implemented an advanced caching system, resulting in up to a 30% boost in listing page loading speed (especially noticeable when applying sorting formulas). This ‘no additional cost’ enhancement presents a substantial bonus for your website and reinforces our dedication to ongoing enhancements.
Enhanced Cross Selling is now available: Includes performance boost!
Yet another ‘no additional cost’ major feature update will soon be applied to your Voracio powered website.
We are excited to announce that we’ve just finished adding some fantastic enhancements to our powerful Cross Selling module. This is another enhancement that comes as standard and free of charge to all our users. We’ve taken influence from the recently enhanced Featured Products Module and these two great modules are now more aligned. The enhancements are as follows:-
- AJAX product loading: Each cross selling group only loads the actual products when they reach the users viewport, this makes for a fantastic page load boost.
- HTML title and subtitle are now available as standard, meaning you can easily customise descriptive content which you can utilise to pass SEO link juice to other landing pages.
- Link button with customisable CTA (Call-to-action).
Happy New Year! We are excited to kick off 2024 with the launch of our greatly enhanced Featured Products module.
- Both the Standard and Premium version of this module have great improvements.
- With the premium version, smart targeting can now be used to dynamically show products based on your chosen attribute criteria, this includes stock message targeting, so for example you can easily only feature products that are in stock.
- We’ve optimised performance, any page that uses featured products now loads on average a minimum of 300ms faster than before.
- There is a choice of two display styles, ordinary and modal listings.
- We’ve introduced a quick view and quick add to basket with a slick UX.
- A title, sub title and primary link can be assigned to any featured product block.
Landing pages are critical to your online marketing strategy and this new enhancement empowers you to build even better pages to engage with your users and increase conversion rates.
Your site will shortly receive the upgrade which includes auto migration of the old styling to new. Please get in touch if you’d like to learn more.
The team at Voracio would like to wish all our dashboard onlookers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
As we approach the end of another busy year we wanted to drop you a quick message to let you know about some great platform enhancements you can look forward to in January 2024.
- Our greatly enhanced Featured Products module is currently having the final additions polished off and we'll soon be completing our user testing with availability for go live very soon. We've added some extra UX enhancements to our original ideas and are very excited to see these rolled out as they will be a great asset to your landing pages.
- Product listing page configuration will soon be enhanced to utilize our advanced 'Smart Targeting' feature (as seen on Base Discounts etc). This will make the configuration of product listings much more adaptable and will also improve listing page performance thanks to the caching mechanisms we use within smart targeting.
- We are soon to implement new 'Computed Attributes' for various promotion features, this means that you will be able to easily build listing pages that contain products automatically matching the target products criteria of a promotion (such as a Base Discount).
The above are enhancements we've had in the pipeline for some time and these will make for a great start to 2024 as we continue to advance the evermore powerful features of Voracio.
We take this opportunity to thank all our clients for their continued support and wish you the very best of success for 2024.
Apple Pay, Google Pay + more with our Stripe integration Upgrade
We are thrilled to announce that Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, UnionPay and more payment types are now available with our upgraded Stripe integration. Our latest integration with Stripe includes Express Checkout for a number of Wallet payments including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link. This means your customers' checkout experience can be faster than ever. Having an unrivaled architecture for payments, Stripe ensures optimal reliability, performance and future proofing.
Fantastic Featured Products module upgrade.
We’re pleased to announce that our longstanding ‘Featured Products Tabs’ module is undergoing a major upgrade and will soon be available as a Standard or Premium version upgrade to your Voracio website. ‘Featured Products Tabs’ was an early module on our platform providing the ability to manually assign a list of products into a tab, with any tab (or multiple tabs) being assignable to a landing page. This widely used module was great for showcasing priority products on core site landing pages. In 2020 we enhanced this module to ‘break out’ the featured products from tabs, making for a more modern and informative layout. In 2022 we added the capability of allowing a featured product tab to be assigned to an editorial suite article, another great feature.
The new module, to be named simply ‘Featured Products’ greatly enhances the module by including our ‘Smart Targeting’ product assignments, multiple rules, a choice of layouts and the ability to utilize tweakable sorting scores such as the automated sales popularity. Stock availability can be used within the smart targeting too, alongside auto limitation of listed item quantities. Many of these core enhancements can be seen on the Premium version of the Voracio Cross Selling module which this enhancement takes influence from. Added to this, we shall be introducing new performance optimization, ensuring the use of featured products places less strain on the page load than the previous version. Watch this space for the official release.
In its Standard version (which contains several of the improvements), all Voracio merchants will be auto upgraded with our next full platform update, the Premium upgrade (with Smart Targeting) will be available on demand.
Our Clerk.io integration just got better!
We're pleased to announce that the latest version of Voracio, 2023.2.0 features our improved integration with Clerk.io Search. With this update, the results page now utilises the Clerk API, meaning we're in full control of the layout of the results page. This means your results can better utilise Voracio facet filters, alongside providing styling consistency over product listings compared to search results page listings.
In adition to search results manipulation capabilities that you have within the Clerk portal, you can now further tweak results by applying Voracio's advanced Sorting Scores within the Search page sorting formula. Added to this, we've developed a neat search results caching facility which will help reduce usage calls to the Clerk.io service, which will help to save costs at Clerk.io.
Voracio version 2023.2.0 also includes several feature, stability and performance updates.
Clerk.io - Sophisticated Search Now Live
We're thrilled to announce that our integration with Clerk.io Search is now live. You can see Clerk Search in action at www.eaglemusicshop.com where it has instantly provided a measurable increase in the user experience. We're deploying Clerk to several more merchants in the coming days, if you haven't yet considered Clerk and would like to learn more, please get in touch and we'll discuss the advantages of upgrading to sophisticated search. For Merchants still using the legacy Nextopia search solution, Clerk provides a more advanced solution at a more competitive price point.
Grow your sales with Clerk.io - Search + Personalisation
Intelligent search and personalisation features are coming soon thanks to our Clerk.io integration. We will initially be offering the Clerk.io search capabilities, an enhancement that will provide a fantastic uplift in your site user experience which will ultimately increase conversion rates and drive sales.
Clerk search provides instant results as the user types, recommended categories, auto correction, recognises synonyms automatically, uses sales data to optimise results plus much more. A particular feature we love is that your Editorial Suite content will also be 'searchable', meaning buying guides, advice articles etc may be recomended which helps guide your searchers to purchase using contextual sales-driven AI.
Clerk also comes with real-time search analytics & insights, providing actionable feedback to better understand what searches drive conversions. To learn about more of the key features of Clerk.io please visit https://www.clerk.io/intelligent-search. Give us a call if you'd like to learn more.
Google Analytics 4
Update: Our GA4 integration was completed and tolled out to all merchants in July 2023
We are pleased to announce that we will shortly be rolling out our platform update for GA4 tracking. The GA4 tracking runs alongside the legacy UA tracking. Your Google Analytics account will require the creation of an all new GA4 property. From that new property we will require the 'Measurement ID' that will be used for the new Google Tag.
The events tracked are purchase, add_to_cart, remove_from_cart, search, view_item, view_cart, sign_up, login (alongside other automated events that come with the core tracking tag). Our integration uses client side alongside server side tracking where possible.
We will be assisting clients with the GA account configuration process over the coming days.
From 1st July 2023, the legacy UA tracking will no longer collect data, at which point we can remove the legacy tracking code from your site.
Empower your cross selling with sales history automation
Did you know that your cross selling rules can utilise the last 12 months sales history sorting score? This is a powerful feature that can save you lots of time and ensure your cross selling items are always relevant. Alongsdie use of the sorting score, you can also boost and manipulate product positions for the ultimate flexibility. No additional commercial plugins or software needed for such a high profile feature, this is a core Voracio offering. If you need help setting this up, please get in touch to arrange a shared screen session and we'll talk you through setting up a new rule.
Performance boost for shared environment merchants
As of 9:40am Monday 3rd April, Voracio just got another performance boost! We are thrilled to announce that this morning we've rolled out a performance boost to clients hosted on our shared environment. This comes by means of an increased database server specification including newer 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® processors with increased RAM. This is a complimentary upgrade and comes at no additional cost.
Offer your customers interest free credit with DivideBuy
Voracio recently partnered with DivideBuy and we're now excited to announce that our integration is readily available and in use by our merchants. A unique selling point of DivideBuy is that it allows the user to check their eligibility before attempting to purchase and this check has no impact on their credit rating.
Our integration has been described by Dan Roberts, (DivideBuy senior retailer support executive) as "...offering a higher user experience than any other platform offering DivideBuy, we now use the Voracio integration as a benchmark example during our sales process". This is because again we've applied our ingenuity and are free from mainstream platform plugin constraints. Our development methodology involves the aggregation of marginal gains and it's this attention to detail with all our integrations that drives greater customer satisfaction and ultimately higher conversion rates.
Please contact us for a demonstration of DivideBuy on one of our merchants live websites. More exciting announcements to come shortly!
Automated inventory and order management. Introducing our strategic partnership with Linnworks.
We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Linnworks, a long established leader in eCommerce inventory and order management. With a number of merchants already on-board, we are looking forward to the go-live of our integration in Q1 2023. Linnworks will play a fundamental role in taking our higher volume merchants to the next level of growth, by streamlining and automating key processes.
Proactive, intensive and personalised support, both technical and strategic has become the de-facto experience for Voracio merchants. This is achieved by our merchants engaging directly with us, the platform architects. This is similarly the case with Linnworks and was a key factor in our partnership decision.
Here is a non exhaustive list of features within the Linnworks ecosystem:-
- Centralized order & inventory management
- Multi channel listings
- Fulfillment, carrier integrations
- Real-time reporting
- Stock forecasting
- Warehouse management
- Immediate insights
- Data driven decisions
To learn more, please drop us a message and we can put you in touch with Andrew, our partner manager.
Account-to-account Open Banking Payments Coming Soon
Voracio merchants can soon say hello to increased profitability, less card fraud and chargebacks with account-to-account payments powered by Open Banking. We are pleased to announce our partnership with Vyne.
Abandoned Cart Module Is Now Available
We are extremely pleased to announce that the Voracio Abandoned Cart Module is now available.
Almost 75% of online shoppers leave items in their carts without completing checkout. Such a high figure is inevitable, however research shows that on average 44% of abandoned cart emails are opened and almost a third of those clicks lead to a recovered sale, added to that research shows the average order value has been seen to increase by over 14% when compared to a typical purchase.
We have implemented a professional grade solution, as standard our module is capable of functionality that comparable third party platform integrations don't. We'll be working up an article on this module soon, but for now we're happy to discuss over a call. Key note are capabilities such as: 3 phase emails, each with customizable content, customizable email delay times, fully automated, dynamic cart insertion, Voracio and Google Analytics tracking, reporting, split testing.
This module is charged based on usage and we are offering a months trial to a limited number of early adopter merchants on a first come first served basis, we look forward to hearing from you so you can take advantage of this fantastic Voracio sales generating module.
Failed card payment notification emails, order page preset and on-site messaging
This handy new feature is now live on platform version 2022.6.0 as a free/standard upgrade. It's a feature we had on our legacy platform and we're pleased to have completed the development on Voracio SaaS Commerce. If a customer tries to pay by card and for some reason their payment fails, such as not authorised or some 3D secure issue, we will instantly send a failed payment notification email to a designated email address of your choice. The email contains details of what the customer was trying to order. There is a link to the unfinished order in the manager. You can use this information to keep an eye on the order and if the customer doesn't complete, you could contact them by phone to assist further.
We've also enhanced this a little further so you can create a filter preset on the main orders page to view orders with failed payments. Plus, we now allow you to customise the failure message that the customer sees within the checkout. This feature can work great to recover an order that may have been otherwise lost. We are aware that in some cases the banks 3D secure mechanisms are not 100% reliable, so a failed order may not be the customers fault. That said, it is still entirely normal to have failed payment attempts, because there can be genuine reasons why a card may fail, such as incorrect address details, non matching card number etc etc. Your payment provider can provide more information on failed payments.
Automated Abandoned Cart Emails
We're thrilled to announce we have commenced development of the Voracio Automated Abandoned Cart Emails module. Industry research shows that up to 90% of shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes a sale. This new Voracio feature will help persuade potentially lost customers to complete their purchase, with an automated campaign. We will be catering for multiple steps within a campaign alongside split testing of different email templates. A reporting page will be provided alongside click tracking for Google Analytics.
Previously, such a feature would require the use of a third party, we're looking forward to the take-up of this premium module and seeing the sales uplift for our clients.
Average 30% reduction of page html in our latest platform release
We are pleased to be rolling out another performance optimization in relation to our handling of responsive images. Our new enhanced approach now outputs less front end code and sees an average 30% reduction in a page's html output. This means faster delivery of pages to your users and less strain on browser resources.
SEO enhancements for image handling
In the past months, we've seen that Google have introduced more thumbnail usage within their SERPs.
With this in mind we've made a number of improvements to our serving of images, these include the additional of a 'src' fallback image within our responsive image code. We've also liaised with our image processing and optimization provider IMGIX and are now able to use custom domains for serving images, this may also have a positive affect on SEO.
Better SEO on Editorial Suite articles with additional structured data
We've added additional schema.org structured data to article pages, this change has already shown advantageous in response to Google SERP changes in recent months with the addition of thumbnail images within result listings. This new schema is automatically added to articles.
Checkout address improvements
We've enhanced the way we intergate with Loqate address lookup, company details are now handled. Also county is now required for customers in Ireland, which ensures exported order data is more accurate.
Click fraud prevention now available
Using Google Ads? Contact us to learn about click fraud prevention. We're using prevention on a number of clients accounts who are now seeing up to 18% cleaner ad traffic.
Order with Deposit
As seen on the fasnastic all new Eagle Music Shop website, we are pleased to offer our new order with deposit cababilities. Contact us to learn more.
Identity verification now available with Hooyu
We have partnered with Hooyu to offer identity verification into our checkout flow. Seamlessly integrated into our checkout and order manager, Hooyu provides merchants with a deeper understanding of their customers and provides an added layer of anti-fraud projection.
Stock messages for assembled products
We've enhanced our assembled products, the most advanced type of product within Voracio. Listing pages now use a cached stock message, based upon the same calculation dynamically used on a product details page. Previously, stock messages on listing pages were not shown for assembled products.
Automated listing page sorting based on order popularity
We are very pleased to announce that the latest version of Voracio features a long awaited module that provides a superb enhnacement to your product listing pages. Developed very much as premium module, we are happy to offer this as a free upgrade to thank our clients for your continued support.
This feature helps ensure that your product listing pages stay highly relevant, in an automated fashion. The sort order of products is based upon the order history over the past 12 months. You also have the option to add additional manipulation to the resulting sorting formula, so you can cherry pick your lead products and push them up the automated listings. You can also choose which pages you'd like to use this advanced feature on. A guide for this module is coming soon, please contact us if you'd like to learn more.
3D Secure v2 - Opayo Protocol 4.00 Upgrade
We are pleased to announce that Voracio is now using Opayo Protocol Version 4. This means your site can now accept payments from banks who have enforced the latest 3D Secure v2 card verification. You are likely to have received emails from Opayo related to the upcoming changes.
Payment Tokenization is now available
We have also developed the Tokenization feature, which means your Opayo users can have the option to save their card details for next time, allowing for faster checkout on future purchases. Please contact us if you would like to use this feature. It requires a small upgrade to your account at Opayo, also your Opayo account needs to be configured to accept Repeat payments. This feature needs to be enabled by Voracio.
Hitachi Capital PaybyFinance integration
Our Hitachi Capital PayByFinance module is now available. Increase sales and conversion rates for higher value items, our integration with Hitachi Capital PaybyFinance sets the gold standard for user experience. Please contact us to learn more.
Trustpilot Automated Feedback Service
Trustpilot is one of the brand leaders in the review sector. We are pleased to announce we can now offer the Trustpilot Automated Feedback Service and Instant Feedback Form. For on-site review display, we have integarted with the Trustpilot API to ensure the style is inkeeping with your site deisgn and also benefits from better SEO compared to using widgets. This is the professional, 'self hosted' reviews approach.
Create stand-out image banners
We're pleased to announce the release of our Grid Block Banners, another great free upgrade as part of our SaaS platform. Create stand-out image banners and assign them to groups to form simple and highly effective grid layouts. We've also updated our banner user guides, you can see example layouts and download templates here. https://knowhow.voracio.co.uk/Grid-Block-Banner-Examples. Contact us if you'd like this new banner type adding to the next update of your site.
Assign qty limit to add-on cross selling
We're soon to release an update to our Add-on Cross Selling module. You will be able to assign a quantity limit to an add-on rule. For example if you'd like to offer a free product when purchased with a parent product, you will be able to limit the user to a max qty of the add on. We've also catered for the complexity of still allowing the user to add more of those products, but then at the full price, if the max add on qty has been applied.
Pre-defined common date range filter
We recently added extra features to the orders page and we're pleased to let you know we're adding more functionality with the addition of a 'Date ranges' filter. You will be able to easily choose from pre-defined dates such as Today, Yesterday, Last 3 Days, This Week, This Month, Last Week, Last Month, Last 3 Months. These can be saved into your managable filter presets too!
Base Discounts
We're pleased to announce that we will soon be deploying an update to our Base Discounts module, found in our promotions section. This small but very useful enhancement allows you to choose which price and type order should be used for the calculations of the base discounts. For example, a product can have a base, was and RRP price. Previously the base discount was always calculated from the the value entered into the base. You can now choose which price and type order to use, which is useful for placing items on a sale, whereby that sale price being calculated back from either the Was or RRP price, thus showing a higher discount.
SEO - Link health centre
We're soon to update Voracio with a new Standard Feature that will assist your SEO and UX efforts. While checking our logs we noticed several merchants having links placed within elements such as banners, touch bars, navigation menu etc that were pointing to pages that no longer exist. Our new link health centre will assist you by identifying those links and allow you to easily correct the issue. The link checker runs on a scheduler so we recommend keeping an eye on this section from time to time in order to keep your links healthy. Look out for the new 'Health' section.
Stock alert sign ups with automated email notification
If you're using any form of stock control and not utilizing our stock notification module, then you're likely missing out on potential sales. We've recently enhanced this module so that you can customize the prompt shown on items that are not in stock via the stock message. It can now be used for simple 'out of stock', 'coming soon' and 'pre-order' products. This feature instils confidence and trust, with a simple email sign up form which doubles up as an optional newsletter signup. The alert emails are automatically sent when the item comes back into stock. Get in touch to learn more.
Faster checkout, reduced delivery errors with Loqate address capture
If you're not already signed up to Loqate, we highly recommend taking advantage of this premium feature. Our Loqate address lookup feature is readily available. Faster checkout, less address errors, reduced cart abandonment and more. Learn more here.
Enhanced order notes and filtering
We're pleased to announce that soon you will be able to structure order notes into your own defined 'types'. Colour coded notes can be displayed on the order listings with the ability to filter by note types. These can then be added to your own pre-defined order page filters. Added to this, we are adding the capability of filtering orders based on product smart targeting. A user guide with use case examples will follow when this new standard feature is released.
GDPR cookie compliance now available with our new partner, Cookiebot
Build trust with your website users while living up to current data protection legislations and avoid potential non-compliance fines. Your websites won't be compiant without the use of this service. Please contact us and visit https://www.cookiebot.com/en/ to learn more.
Define your own filter sets on the orders page
We're thrilled to announce the release of this super new feature that gives you more control ofer your orders page. You can do define your own custom and default filter sets using the filters available. Here's our guide to set you on your way to more organized order management.
Improved performance & security with Front Door
Azure Front Door service is now available. This helps protect your website from hackers, spammy bots and improves the overall performance of your site. Now in use by several merchants, call us to discuss the benefits and pricing.
Welcome to your new dashboard
The new Voracio dashboard is here to keep you in the loop of new platform releases. As part of our SaaS service, we release updates regularly which can include new features, bug fixes, security updates etc.
Features that are of significance to your day to day use of Voracio are likely to be shown on this page. We'll also let you know about new features that are within our roadmap.
Look out for the 'Standard' and 'Premium' icons. Standard features are applied to your site free of charge. Premium features can be quoted for upon request.