E-commerce

Early this week, Amazon.com created a firestorm when it announced it had fired all of its Colorado-based online affiliates to protest a state sales tax law. The law, HB10-1193, which was signed by Gov. Bill Ritter on February 24, requires out-of-state retailers to either collect and remit sales tax for purchases made by Colorado residents or to inform their Colorado customers that they owe use tax on any purchase they have made.

In the past year, more than 100 ABA IndieCommerce sites have successfully migrated to the system's new Drupal platform, and now the migration of store sites from the old system to the new is in its final stages.

Over the course of next month, IndieCommerce staff will be moving stores still on the legacy system to the new platform, where they'll have the benefits of a very flexible, stable, and search-engine friendly website. The new system also allows ABA to begin offering many exciting features that booksellers have been requesting for several years.

This week, the American Booksellers Association announced the addition of an op-ed template to the new E-Fairness Action Kit (E-FACT). Booksellers are urged to adapt the op-ed and to e-mail it to their local newspapers as a way of promoting the issue of e-fairness.

This week, the American Booksellers Association presented IndieCommerce members with a roadmap of upgrades and new features planned for the first half of 2010. ABA also assured members that, in the wake of the staff reorganization announced last week, IndieCommerce remains an extremely high priority and that the recent changes would put staff in a stronger position to respond to customer service questions and to implement new features.

ABA IndieCommerce this week launched a new feature that allows stores to create new orders on their customers' behalf and charge their credit cards automatically using a secure, encrypted feature called a Customer Information Manager (CIM) Profile.

A CIM Profile is an encrypted data snapshot of a customer's credit card info.

How might you use this feature?

Eighteen ABA member stores have migrated from the old BookSense.com legacy system to IndieCommerce's Drupal-based platform in the last month, bringing the total number of stores on the new system to more than 120.

This week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) released a report that calls into question Amazon.com's justifications for opposing e-fairness legislation that has been passed or introduced in a number of states.

The American Booksellers Association has made several announcements regarding its IndieCommerce and BookSense.com products:

In the past two weeks, 11 more ABA IndieCommerce sites have gone live on the program's new Drupal platform, which is earning high marks from booksellers and bringing an overall increase in traffic to ABA member sites.

Connecticut has finally resolved its budget battles two months after the start of the state's fiscal year, but, unfortunately for the state's bricks-and-mortar businesses, e-fairness legislation was left on the cutting room floor.

ABA member stores with IndieCommerce websites on the Drupal platform now have the ability to sell more than 220,000 e-books in several formats, including Adobe, Palm, and Microsoft. The new functionality allows consumers to purchase e-books and to have those books downloaded from store sites to consumers' computers and/or handheld devices.

More than 70 ABA members have now migrated their store websites to Drupal, the new ABA IndieCommerce platform, with 24 launching since early August.

On Tuesday, August 25, Sony announced that it is cooperating with the American Booksellers Association, other retailers, and a variety of traditional and digital publishers to make available a universe of reading material in EPUB format compatible with Sony Readers. Among the sites offering EPUB content for sale to consumers will be more than 200 independent bookstores participating in ABA's IndieCommerce program.

This week, ABA IndieCommerce announced a deadline extension for stores that have not yet received training on the migration of their sites to the new Drupal platform. The migration deadline for those stores is now November 1; however, booksellers who have received training before July 17 will still be required to migrate their websites to the new platform by September 1.

On Monday, April 27, Alzada Knickerbocker of The Avid Reader in Davis, California, and Hut Landon, the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA), are scheduled to testify at a hearing before the California State Assembly Committee o