IndieCommerce’s New “Staff Reviews” Feature Receives an Enthusiastic Response

Last week, the American Booksellers Association launched a new feature that allows bookstores to add staff reviews to individual product pages on their IndieCommerce websites. The announcement was met with positive feedback from booksellers, who were quick to put the new functionality to use.

“We are so happy about the new staff review tool,” said Julie Wernersbach, publicist at Austin’s BookPeople. “We’ve been hoping for something like this for a long time. Curating our online inventory is always a challenge. This allows us to personalize the virtual shopping experience and offer some guidance for customers as they browse, similar to the experience they’d have shopping in-store.”

Wernersbach is looking forward to bringing more of BookPeople’s personality to its virtual space, and plans to feature much of the store’s blog content of book blurbs and reviews on the IndieCommerce site.

BookPeople is also planning to put together lists of staff recommendations online. “This wasn't impossible to do before, but the new tool makes it so much easier,” Wernersbach said, adding that she is happy about being able to use boldface and italics, as well as to include links and images in reviews.

When Snowbound Books in Marquette, Michigan, switched from another e-commerce service provider to IndieCommerce last year, the only hesitation for owner Dana Schulz was that IndieCommerce did not yet have a staff review capability. “So I’m just super geeked that it’s here,” said Schulz.

Noting that Snowbound’s website visitors will now be able to “stumble across” reviews rather than having to go look for them, Schulz said, “We’ve noticed around the store that our shelf-talkers can really spike the sales of the book, so I’m hoping this will act in the same way.”

Jarek Steele, co-owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri, said he and his staff are excited to add more dimension to the books they sell online. “I think this gives customers a lot more information. A lot of the time, the descriptions are really generic,” Steele said. “Our customers really love and look forward to our staff picks, so it’s cool that we can attach those descriptions right to the book on the site.”

Steele has been experimenting with the functions of the new review feature since it was launched, exploring ways to make it more interactive. In the future, he hopes to be able to add customer reviews to the site as well.