Spotlight on ABA IndieCommerce at BEA

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ABA IndieCommerce's new Drupal platform, recently launched features such as wholesaler fulfillment, and the upcoming debut of an easy-to-use e-book functionality all drew the interest of booksellers at BookExpo America.

On Thursday, May 28, then ABA Chief Program Officer Len Vlahos and Ricky Leung, IndieCommerce director, presented "ABA IndieCommerce Solution: The New System," a demonstration and Q&A session, as part of ABA's Day of Education at BEA. The session was aimed at owners, managers, webmasters, and frontline booksellers from stores not currently using IndieCommerce. And on Friday, May 29, a group of 30-plus booksellers participated in a users group meeting, where they asked questions of, and provided feedback to, Vlahos, Leung, and IndieCommerce staff members Scott Nafz and Patti Neski. In addition, IndieCommerce staff was available to meet one-on-one with booksellers in the ABA Booksellers Lounge throughout the show.

At the Thursday session, Vlahos and Leung told booksellers that an intuitive e-book functionality accommodating three different e-book formats -- Adobe, Microsoft, and the Palm Reader -- should be available to IndieCommerce sites sometime in June. The IndieCommerce e-book functionality will allow users to browse e-books by category as well as perform a separate search for e-books.

At the Friday Users Group, Vlahos reported that the migration of sites to the new Drupal platform is well underway, and he stressed, "If you haven't migrated your site to the new Drupal platform by Labor Day, your old site will cease to exist." Booksellers have the option of migrating the content of their current site to the new platform or building a new Drupal website from the ground up.

Vlahos also reminded attendees that wholesaler fulfillment is now available to all stores using the IndieCommerce platform.

Leung noted that ABA IndieCommerce features a choice of 27 free template themes, and, as an open source platform, Drupal offers a whole library of additional free themes at Drupal.org. Booksellers can also search the Internet to find other free themes or they may choose to buy one. "You can go to Themeshark.com and buy a Drupal theme for under $100 (although there are pricier ones)," Leung said. "And, if you want to buy a template theme outright so no one else can use it, that's also possible, but at a higher price."

The discussion turned to inventory uploads, and while Vlahos said that uploads weren't required, "we do encourage that you upload your inventory every day at least.... All the major POS systems allow you to export inventory. Once you have the file, we offer a tool that allows you to upload your inventory. And Above the Treeline does it one time a day automatically if you use that."

Nafz reported that the migration process can be fairly quick, though ultimately, it is up to the store. "Once we import the content, it is fairly immediate," he said. Moreover, he cautioned attendees to make sure their domain name is not about to expire. "We had one store that had its domain name expire ... and someone took it. Once it's gone, that's it. It's up to you to renew." A bookseller should be sure to have the domain name and user password for the store site before speaking with Nafz about the migration.

ABA is now offering training sessions and step-by-step instructions to current IndieCommerce stores to guide their site migration to the Drupal platform. Stores that haven't already set up a training session should send an e-mail to [email protected] offering several possible Monday dates in June, July, or August.

Training sessions are generally scheduled for Mondays at noon Eastern Time to allow stores in different time zones to participate at the same time and to afford enough time for participants to finish a session, which can run anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours.

In order to give stores an idea of how the site and the training will work, ABA staff has created instructional videos, which can be accessed with a BookWeb log-in. When a bookseller feels comfortable with the system's controls, ABA arranges for the store's existing content to be migrated to the new site. More advanced follow-up training will then be offered on Thursdays or Fridays. --David Grogan