Over the past year, we’ve been listening to your feedback and dreaming of a future when Vextras would be bigger, better and more user-friendly than ever before.

That future is here. That future is Vextras 7.0.

Our team has been hard at work transforming your Vextras experience. Everything will hopefully feel a bit slicker, simpler and more powerful. Without further ado, here’s what we’ve got in store for you in Vextras 7.0.

We say goodbye to Mandrill

Messaging workflows have quickly become our most popular tool. Just last year, we helped online retailers create more than $6M in sales with them. But, as things evolved it became clear that we’d made the setup too complicated. For example, in the past you needed an account with Mandrill (and MailChimp), verify a sending domain, add DNS records and then finally you could use our workflows. We had good intentions for this configuration in the beginning, but it wasn’t a good user experience.

In 7.0, we break down those barriers and allow you to start sending workflow messages almost instantly. You’ll no longer be required to have a Mandrill account to create a workflow. But, you’ll still be able to white label a sending domain. White labeling your sending domain makes it transparent to your customers where the message came from, and ensures high deliverability. Best of all, you may send as many emails as you want at no extra charge.

Don’t worry, if you still want to use Mandrill that’s totally fine. All workflows will continue to function as normal. However, if you’d prefer to switch over to our sending engine, just go to your workflow settings and flip on the Vextras sending engine.

New customer metrics

Many of you have asked for better customer reporting. We’ve listened and in 7.0 we’re making our first step to bring you more insight. You’ll now be able to visualize your customer’s activity at a more intuitive, granular level:

• Total orders
• Total sales
• Average sale price
• Average purchase frequency
• Number of unique products purchased
• Workflow conversion stats

Updated workflow structure

We’re organizing the types of messaging options we support when adding a new workflow type – giving you the choice between marketing and transactional.

Marketing

• Customer Retention
• Customer Rewards
• First-Time Buyers
• Product Reviews
• Product Triggers
• Custom

Transactional

• Abandoned Carts
• Invoices (New!)
• Order Updates

Auto-scale pricing

Since inception, we’ve gone the traditional software as a service route with thresholds on our subscription plans – in our case orders. Now, with auto-scale pricing, your account won’t be paused if you hit a certain limit. On plan renewal, you’ll be charged for any overages incurred from the previous billing cycle.

Auto-scale pricing is ideal for stores that have order volumes that may fall in-between our standard subscription plans. As a result, your app integrations and workflow messages will flow without interruption.

Improved infrastructure

Under the hood we’ve invested in our infrastructure, partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Although most users won’t see the nuts and bolts of what we’ve done under the hood, you’ll enjoy faster processing times and functionality. Our messaging queues and server clusters are now driven by the most advanced systems in the world, designed for maximum scalability. We’re very excited about these improvements, as it allows us to handle millions of transactions each day.

Other updates

In 7.0, we completed more than 550+ updates and optimized thousands of lines of code. Here are some other highlights with our release that we hope you find useful.

Apps

• We removed Google Analytics as an official app since it’s only used to populate high-level metrics in your dashboard. However, you’ll still be able to activate it and see those key stats.
• Enhanced Slack notifications for when a certain app or workflow events happen (or don’t happen)
• Removed Zapier hooks from our legacy system that was retired 12/21/16.
• Fixed bug with Xero discounts not being carried over for Bigcommerce and 3dcart shopping carts

Workflows

• New workflow type – Invoices
• Added new categories of workflows, ‘Marketing’ and ‘Transactional’
• See “live carts” for abandoned cart workflows
• Use any type of duration for test mode messages (before it was limited to just minutes)
• Visualize workflow unsubscribes, bounces, etc. in our new Suppressions area
• Updated workflow templates with the capability to render store information (i.e. name, address, logo, url and social links)

Other Updates

• Added the capability for webhooks
• Added search capability to our orders and customers area
• Hundreds of UI/UX enhancements
• Overhauled our WooCommerce plugin to make setup simpler
• Control the opt-in box location for WooCommerce stores
• WooCommerce can now click back to a cart on any device, not just the original source of where an abandoned cart originated
• Enabled hack to turn off all WooCommerce notifications in one click if you’re using our workflows instead
• Improved responsiveness on smaller screens
• Official retirement of our legacy app

7.0 is now ready

Take full advantage of our new features right away. All upgrades are now live in your account and we can’t wait to see how you grow your business with it.