IndieCommunication: News, Updates, and More

Here’s the IndieCommunication e-newsletter for Friday, May 29:

Ingram and Consumer Direct Fulfillment (CDF) Orders

If you have problems with your Ingram CDF orders, you should not be contacting Ingram directly. CDF orders are actually processed using ABA’s Ingram account. If you run into any issues with those orders, you need to contact IndieCommerce support at [email protected] and we will contact Ingram on your behalf. Please include detailed order information in your email to the support team.

Processing Online Orders Faster

One of the big issues with processing a high volume of online orders is the amount of time it takes to manually transfer those orders into your store’s POS system. Over the past few months, quite a few IndieCommerce and IndieLite stores have reached out to their POS vendor and IndieCommerce requesting an automated solution. We now have three POS vendors that allow integration with IndieCommerce:

• iBID
• Anthology
• Booklog

Please reach out to any of the above POS vendors to find out more about their integration with IndieCommerce. If your POS vendor is not one of those listed, ask them if they are interested in integrating with IndieCommerce. We would be happy to discuss it with them.

Browsers Causing Problems When Updating Your Website

Users have recently reported experiencing problems adding and editing content, specifically with adding books to booklists. For example, a page stalls on “Please wait,” and fields that normally populate do not appear. This has been experienced with multiple recent web browser updates, specifically ones based on Google’s Chrome browser. These are the problem browsers:

• Chrome version 83.0.4103.61 on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS
• Microsoft Edge version 83.0.478.37 (the newest release of Edge is Chrome-based)

Recommended solution: The Chrome team has acknowledged this problem as a regression and is working on a fix, though it is not yet clear whether that fix will be released in weeks or months. In the meantime, Firefox and Safari (for Mac) are the two browsers that do not seem to experience this issue (or at least there is less occurrence of it). It is recommended that members switch to using the newest version of Firefox or Safari until the Chrome issue is resolved.

• Firefox Version 76.0.1 on a Windows 10 computer and Mac appears to work normally. Clicking “Add a Book” when editing a page’s booklist populates the ISBN and other related fields just fine.
• Safari Version 13.1 on Mac

IndieCommerce and IndieLite Registration Reopens

The IndieCommerce team is once again accepting signups from stores that want to launch a IndieCommerce or IndieLite website.

Booksellers are encouraged to send their thoughts, questions, or suggestions via email to IndieCommerce staff at any time.

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