ABA Plans Improvements for IndieCommerce

Last week, the American Booksellers Association informed IndieCommerce participants about program changes and improvements to be rolled out over the next several months. In an e-mail to IndieCommerce stores, ABA Technology Director Matt Supko noted, "From the Spring Forums, to ABA's Digital Task Force, to BEA, the message from ABA members has been very clear: IndieCommerce is a crucial program for independent bookstores, and never more so than right now. To keep IndieCommerce sites successful, stable, and growing, we will be implementing some major changes over the next few months."

ABA Investment in IndieCommerce

During its meeting at BookExpo America, the ABA Board approved a substantial one-time investment in IndieCommerce to improve core functions and to add several new ones. The improvements will be released in two phases. Phase 1, slated to launch in time for the 2010 holiday season, will include an improved book search and a single product page and search result for different editions of a book (hardcover, paperback, e-book, etc.), as well as several improvements to the checkout experience.

Phase 2, which will launch in 2011, is slated to include wish lists and coupons/store loyalty programs. All IndieCommerce users will receive these upgrades as they become available.

Additional Customer Support

With more stores seeking to get the most out of their websites, the volume of customer service requests received by IndieCommerce has been increasing. To help handle these requests, ABA has added a new full-time staff member: Technical Support Coordinator Nigel Sylvester (nigel@bookweb.org, ext. 6682).

A bookstore's' member relations manager—Kaitlin Pitcher (kaitlin@bookweb.org, ext. 6666) or Elizabeth Nichols (elizabethn@bookweb.org, ext. 6614)—will also be able to answer questions about IndieCommerce, and Scott Nafz (scott@bookweb.org, ext. 6654) will continue to serve as senior customer service coordinator.

To simplify customer service requests, and to ensure a prompt response, all IndieCommerce customer service requests should be sent to staff@bookweb.org. Questions will be forwarded to the person best suited to handle them.

New IndieCommerce Contract

To reflect the completion of the transition from the legacy BookSense.com platform as well as the changing business models for selling e-books, ABA is in the process of updating its IndieCommerce contracts and will mail new contracts to stores during the summer.

Individual Merchant Gateway Accounts

One of the major changes between IndieCommerce and BookSense.com is that credit cards are now processed online, rather than being forwarded to the store for manual processing. This step was necessary for PCI compliance. To simplify the setup for all stores, ABA set up a master payment gateway account with a company called Authorize.net. ABA currently charges the customer's credit card and collects the funds, and deposits those funds into the store bank account twice monthly.

While this system served to get the new IndieCommerce platform up and running, it has become clear over the last year and a half that it is not the best setup for bookstores or for ABA. Besides waiting for twice-monthly payments, stores are not able to control the address verification/fraud protection settings, which can cause checkout problems for customers whose addresses do not match their bank information.

This arrangement has also made ABA responsible for fraudulent orders without giving the association any direct oversight. Each month ABA receives thousands of dollars in chargebacks from stolen credit cards and the number is increasing. Since ABA is responsible for processing the card, it has been covering the full cost of these chargebacks even though most orders fall to the stores to process and ABA has no review power over whether orders are approved or not.

For these reasons, ABA is strongly encouraging all IndieCommerce stores to set up their own payment gateway account with Authorize.net. Among other benefits, this will allow stores to:

• Receive payment daily, rather than twice a month, from the store website;
• Maintain complete control over fraud protection settings for the store website;
• Have the store's name appear on the customer's credit card statement, rather than "Independent Bookstore"; and,
• Refund customers directly if necessary.

An Authorize.net account costs $17.95 a month, plus a $99 set up fee. There are two optional features, the fraud protection suite, which ABA recommends, at $9.95/month, and the CIM profile feature, which permanently and securely stores customer credit card data, and costs $20/month. For stores that sign up for their own Authorize.net account before November 1, 2010, ABA will credit back to the bookseller the full $99 set up fee. Moreover, for those stores ABA will no longer take 4.5 percent of wholesaler-fulfilled orders—or of any order.

Stores that choose not to establish their own Authorize.net account may remain on the shared ABA Authorize.net account. However, effective November 1, 2010, for all stores without their own Authorize.net account, ABA will collect 4.5 percent of every order placed through the store website. This additional collection is necessary to cover the increasing cost of chargebacks that ABA is assuming on members' behalf.

IndieCommerce participants will receive an e-mail from ABA with more details about setting up an Authorize.net account. Questions about setting up a store Authorize.net account may be addressed to Nigel Sylvester (ext. 6682) or to staff@bookweb.org.

Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 Upgrade

Over the summer, IndieCommerce staff will be coding and testing an upgrade of all sites from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, and it is anticipated that the upgrade will go live in early September. Although no major new features will be part of this update, it will improve overall stability and performance and will help ABA plan for the future. Once Drupal 7 is released (tentatively, later this year) security patches for Drupal 5 will end, and IndieCommerce will need to be on Drupal 6 to stay current.

The upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 should be a seamless experience for most users. It will require some downtime, which will be announced in advance. In addition, stores that have created custom themes or modified existing ones may need to make some code tweaks in order for their themes to continue to function. IndieCommerce staff will reach out to each store with a custom theme individually over the next couple of weeks to explain and offer assistance.

"We believe these changes, along with ABA's partnership with Google to offer Google Editions through IndieCommerce websites, will put IndieCommerce users in a more competitive position than ever before," said Supko.