Consumer sentiment about buying online from their local bookstore radically shifted post COVID. We are still feeling the ramifications of what occurred over the past four years. Some major points to consider are:
IndieCommerce 2.0 Update
April 4, 2024
Like most major construction projects, IndieCommerce 2.0 has had its fair share of delays. We know that has been frustrating for stores not just eager to transition to the new platform but desperately needing to modernize their website, ensure they are competitive, serve their customers needs, and optimize their online sales.
The ABA team working on this project are unwavering in this commitment and the project continues to be a top priority for ABA.
The ABA Board has approved an additional $300K to help expedite as many store site migrations by the end of the year as possible.
If any of your questions are not addressed in this FAQ, please contact staff@bookweb.org
Best Practices for store to follow to keep their site accessible
As holiday shopping rapidly approaches, it's a good time to begin preparing your IndieCommerce 2.0 site for the upcoming season.
We highly encourage you and your staff managing the website to attend our weekly users groups. These sessions are particularly helpful in keeping up to date with platform updates, learning about your website, and discussing features or ideas with other stores.
Last week we handed over the first IC 2.0 sites to our initial group of ABA member stores, and they are hard at work populating their new sites with content. While working on their new sites, these stores have been providing our developers and support staff with invaluable feedback and suggestions.
As a result of their insights, the IndieCommerce development team and our project partners from Lullabot have pushed out some excellent new features and improvements. As each of these is completed by the development team, they then undergo extensive testing prior to the new code being merged back into each store’s 2.0 website.
Each of these code changes makes the new IndieCommerce 2.0 platform a better business tool for our members and a better experience for their online customers. As these first bookstores progress on building out their new IC 2.0 websites, the volume of requested changes to code should begin to taper off as the new platform evolves.
On July 25, 2022, we began a phased rollout of new IndieCommerce 2.0 websites to bookstores so that their staff can familiarize themselves with the new platform and start customizing their site to fit their needs.
During this transition, all websites on the current IndieCommerce and IndieLite platforms will continue to be fully supported until every store has been moved to their new 2.0 website.
In this first phase of the transition to IC 2.0 we will be working with new stores that recently joined IndieCommerce, IndieLite stores, and some IndieCommerce stores that have a limited need for advanced features. Two examples of advanced features include: Uploading Local Store Inventory (LSI) data from your bookstore's POS to IC2.0, POS Integration with IC2.0.
This is the second half of our two part story on the integration of POS systems with the IndieCommerce 1.0 platform. If you missed Part 1, it is viewable here.
With the sustained increase in online sales since March 12, 2019, online orders can now represent as much as 30% or more of a bookstore’s annual revenue. Manually managing and fulfilling those online orders can take a significant amount of time for bookstores. To automate and expedite the processing of web orders, stores have started integrating their IndieCommerce website with their POS system.
Over the past two years, retail customers have been shopping online at independent bookstores in record numbers. To help manage the boom in online shopping, recent updates to the IndieCommerce platform can help make the fulfillment process easier and cheaper — and faster for your customers.
Consumer Behavior Has Changed
The graph at the top of the page shows how recent online customer traffic is up 243% vs the same period in 2019. The data for the graph represents the aggregated online traffic for 560 IndieCommerce and IndieLite websites between January 1, 2022 and February 13, 2022 (blue line), compared to the same period in pre-COVID 2019 (orange line).