Here’s the IndieCommunication e-newsletter for Friday, September 13:

An Important Reminder About Your Website Passwords

As we mentioned in August, the IndieCommerce team has seen a sharp increase in attempted hacking activities directed specifically at store administrator accounts. The consequences of a hacker logging into an administrator account on your IndieCommerce or IndieLite site can be dire. To address this threat, we’ve started to implement mandatory password changes and a number of character requirements for all store administrators. Over the next few months, we will be notifying stores that they need to make the required changes to their passwords; all administrators will need to change their password. The recent IndieCommunication newsletter on password security [4] has some good ideas for you and your staff to consider.

E-mail From Authorize.net

You may receive an e-mail from Authorize.net [5] that reads:

“Authorize.Net will be making changes to the internet connection that serves our data centers and moving away from Akamai SureRoute as a content delivery network (CDN) for our services…..”

The IndieCommerce staff will be addressing the issue outlined in that e-mail. It is not necessary for your store to do anything related to that e-mail. If you have any questions, contact [email protected] [6].

It’s NOT SPAM

If you receive a form submission from your IndieCommerce or IndieLite website that looks like spam and mark it as such, you may stop receiving any messages for your IndieCommerce or IndieLite website. This is because all e-mail messages, including order notifications and form submissions, are delivered to member stores from the same automated service. In order to keep from sending unwanted messages, this service will stop all future e-mails to your store. All e-mails for IndieCommerce stores come from [email protected] [7], and all e-mails for IndieLite stores come from [email protected] [8]. Those are very important e-mail addresses for your store to receive messages from. DO NOT MARK THEM AS SPAM.

It's very important to note that although a form submission may be spam, the e-mail notifying you of that submission is not. If you notice that you are not receiving routine e-mails such as order confirmations (always remember to check for orders on your site periodically), contact [email protected] [6] and we’ll be happy to investigate whether there are delivery problems for your e-mail address.

New Features

We’ve got some new features for you to try out.

Email or username: Store staff and customers can now log in using either their e-mail address or username. This feature is available on IndieCommerce and will soon be available on IndieLite.

Cart Redirect: This keeps customers on the search results page or book list after they add an item to their cart. This will make it easy for customers to continue shopping and add more items to the cart. Available on IndieCommerce; coming soon to IndieLite. To use this feature, the setting should be changed on this page: store->configuration->cart. Set “Add to cart redirect” setting to “<none>.”

Store staff can now apply coupon discounts to an order after the order has been placed. All existing coupon conditions will apply. See the help doc here [9].

If It’s “Zero” Leave It Off Your LSI Feed

If you are one of the many stores that upload your “Local Store Inventory” (LSI) to your IndieCommerce site, please DO NOT include merchandise that have a quantity of zero in your feed. By uploading these books, your customers’ search results for books that you have in stock will be negatively affected. If you have questions about this, please contact [email protected] [6].

Booksellers are encouraged to send their thoughts, questions, or suggestions via e-mail to IndieCommerce staff [6] at any time.

Past editions of IndieCommunication are available on the IndieCommerce Updates page on BookWeb.org. [10]