Dear IndieCommerce and IndieLite Booksellers, 

This update is for you. In the past three months, IndieCommerce (and IndieLite) have proven their worth in gold. The hard work of the team that has been developing ABA’s e-commerce platforms for over a decade saw the fruits of their labor as, overnight, bookstores found themselves dependent on their web sales because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Despite the unprecedented volume, the IndieCommerce (IC) machine held up — but not without a significant learning curve for many stores, ABA’s continued investment in infrastructure, and the tremendous effort of the following ABA team members: Phil Davies, Geetha Nathan, Matt Supko, Josh Harding, Scott Nafz, Chanthee Keokhaw, Ryan Quinn, and Courtney Karecki (as well as Ana Gonzalez, Maria Rodriguez, and P.K. Sindwani in accounting, and Alison Larkin, who pinch hit for the IC team).

This recent period has also shined a light on the system’s weaknesses. There are inefficiencies, and the platform lacks some features that stores desperately need. We’ve also seen that despite consistent communication on the part of our team, stores still ask for improvements that already exist; our communication needs to be different, if not better.  

Since March, ABA has hired two additional customer service support people (Finn and Murray), outsourced additional programming, added four web servers, increased the ability of the platform’s load balancer, upgraded our database, and made dozens of improvements, all while responding to hundreds of customer support emails a day. All of that got us to today. Now we’re focused on how we can improve the system to ensure that stores have what they need for what we anticipate to be a critical 4th quarter for e-commerce. And we’re looking at the long game, too. What is the future of IC for ABA and your stores?

IC is one of the top priorities for ABA right now. Our time commitment reflects that. Now we need to turn to financial support for the program as well. One of the things that has held IC back has been limited financial investment. We need to change that to ensure that IC becomes what you need it to be, and we’ll need your help.

Here’s the plan beginning August 1:

• Baseline IndieCommerce and IndieLite monthly dues will remain the same — $175 per month for IndieCommerce, $50 per month for IndieLite

• All IndieCommerce and IndieLite stores will also pay a service fee of 1% on all of their own e-commerce sales, with a $500 monthly cap on this amount

• Beginning August 1, stores using ABA’s credit card processing will no longer be billed the 4.5% fee they’ve been paying as a service fee. ABA will help these stores transition to their own processor over the next few months. (ABA is getting out of the credit card processing business.) Details to follow. 

• ABA will use some of the endowment to fund capital investments to take IndieCommerce and IndieLite into the future. 

A couple of people commented in the June 11 Town Hall that IndieCommerce is too expensive. ABA has kept the cost of IndieCommerce and IndieLite as low as possible for members over the years. This came at a cost and has now caught up with us. Now is the time for us all to invest in e-commerce for the indies. This new fee structure, along with the use of the endowment, is necessary and we think fair for the marketplace. 

The new fee structure — 1% of all transactions resulting from customers purchasing merchandise on a store’s IndieCommerce or IndieLite website (including all transactions in your e-commerce shopping cart: in-store pick up, direct to home, and consumer direct fulfilled) — begins August 1, 2020. 

ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together.

Allison