E-commerce

The month of July will feature a Marketing Meetup on marketing as a small store, plus two Technology Meetups, one on cyber insurance and the other on Zoom.

The most recent email from the IndieCommerce team shares instructions for what information to include in a refund request, which will help ABA expedite these requests.

After receiving requests to revisit the topic, this meetup will also focus on what needs to change as businesses are in various states of operation and events are taking place virtually instead of in-person.

In this session, booksellers heard about an online chatbot service and saw a demonstration of how it works from the customer side. 

Much of the traffic increase from two weeks ago was driven by first-time customers who were referred from Google searches to bookstores that were selling antiracism titles. 

Booksellers are encouraged to sign up for virtual one-on-ones with members of ABA’s IndieCommerce team, open to current IndieCommerce and IndieLite members as well as to non-members.

On June 11, hear from Angela Trigg of Haunted Bookshop, who has created a chatbot through which customers can place orders on the store’s website. On June 25, learn more about marketing your store to a school.

ABA partnered with Hummingbird in 2018 for e-book sales. The free, turnkey e-book and audiobook retailing platform allows bookstores to have their own branded and customizable storefront.

The June Indie Next List e-newsletter, featuring the month’s 20 titles with bookseller quotes in addition to a Q&A with the #1 pick, was sent to more than 670,956 customers at 171 ABA member stores.

Readers flooded bookstore websites in search of antiracism titles last week. Over the weekend, traffic began to slow to normal rates for this time of year.

This increase is the result of customers shopping for antiracism titles across the IndieCommerce system.