ABA Delays New e-Commerce Solution
by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 10/21/2008 7:38:00 AM
Eight years ago when the American Booksellers Association launched BookSense.com, it served as both a Web site and a turnkey portal for member stores. Fast forward to BEA 2008 and the unveiling of the ABA’s IndieBound marketing program, or “movement,” to replace Book Sense. BookSense.com immediately morphed into IndieBound.org, with a lot more power under the hood. The ABA swapped out the old code underpinning BookSense.com and replaced it with Drupal, an open source Web content management system that has enabled the site to create an online community.
However, moving all 230 BookSense.com stores to Drupal has proved much more challenging. One of the biggest bumps in the road, according Len Vlahos, ABA chief program officer, has been bookseller training. With the granular level of control that Drupal offers, early testers have been overwhelmed by the number of options they have to personalize their Web sites, from how they want their events calendars to look to whether they want to have a gift registry. “We’re very enthusiastic about having an open-source Web site,” said Kerry Slattery, general manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, one of the first booksellers to sign with BookSense.com. “But we can see that there’s a learning curve on this.”
To give booksellers like Slattery more time to experiment with their store’s beta site, ABA cancelled the e-commerce workshops to have taken place at the regional trade shows this fall. The organization is pushing back its timetable to switch bookseller Web sites to Drupal while it works on taming “the beast” (the bookseller’s economic and sales tool), the Tarrytown nickname for the ABA E-Commerce Solution. And it is preparing Webinars and in-person training sessions to begin just after the holiday selling season to give bookseller/Web designers more personalized attention.
“The goal is to have a couple sites up by Thanksgiving,” said Vlahos, who would like to see the majority, if not all, sites operating under the old system move to Drupal by next year’s BEA. “We’re continuing to slow it down to make sure we get it right,” said Vlahos, noting that the new platform will continue to rely on the Ingram database for its search engine.
Echoing Vlahos, beta-tester Jenn Northington, events and marketing manager at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, noted, “There are so many options. We want to take our time and get it right the first time. Once it goes live, I’d like it to be right.” Her biggest concern is how best to convey the store’s brand. The Drupal feature that she’s most excited about will enable stores to add products directly to their online database without going through the ABA, even if the item doesn’t have an ISBN. Since The King’s English carries a number of books by self-published authors whose books aren’t in the Ingram database, the new site will be able to better reflect the physical store, said Northington. She’s also looking forward to increased interactions with customers online, since Drupal allows customers to post comments.
For now, all ABA e-commerce stores continue to operate under the old system and can be accessed through IndieBound.org or the individual store URLs. When a store’s Drupal site is completed, the store will go offline overnight while the switchover is made. Vlahos anticipates moving 2 to 15 stores to their new sites each week, with the bulk of the shifts coming over the course of the next six to nine months
