Dear Valued IndieCommerce Member,
For 125 years, the American Booksellers Association has been dedicated to a single, non-profit mission: ensuring the success and sustainability of independent bookstores. Our IndieCommerce (IC) platform is a direct extension of that mission. It is an e-commerce solution built by booksellers, for booksellers, with features and functions developed specifically from your suggestions and feedback.
As you know, we are in the final stages of a multi-year project to move all members from the legacy IC 1.0 to the new IndieCommerce 2.0 platform. We want to be clear: IC 2.0 was not a simple upgrade. It was a complete, from-the-ground-up rebuild on a modern, secure, and powerful Drupal 10 framework.
This new platform provides you with a state-of-the-art e-commerce solution that simply isn't available from any other source. It allows you to:
- Compete effectively with national and international online retailers.
- Access powerful, custom features built specifically for independent booksellers (see the full feature list here).
- Benefit from continuous improvements and updates (view recent release notes here).
- Integrate seamlessly with many in-store POS systems that bookstores use.
- Leverage book data from Ingram's catalog of over 13 million titles.
Building and, just as importantly, maintaining this level of technology is a significant financial commitment. The digital landscape has changed dramatically since our core monthly fees were established over a decade ago.
In that time, the costs for essential services have risen exponentially. This includes enterprise-level hosting, mandatory PCI compliance for credit card security, and the now-critical use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to protect your sites from malicious bot traffic and AI scraping.
The 1% commission we introduced several years ago helped us cover a portion of these increasing operational costs, but it no longer covers the expense of running this vastly more advanced and secure platform.
To ensure we can continue to support, secure, and enhance the IC 2.0 platform, we will be implementing our first increase in monthly platform fees in over ten years.
This change will not go into effect until January 1, 2026.
We are sharing this information with you now, to ensure you have ample time to plan and budget for this change. We will communicate the specific details of the new fee structure well before the implementation date.
We want to be completely transparent about where your fees go. As a non-profit, we do not serve outside investors. We work for you. Every dollar you pay for IndieCommerce goes directly back into maintaining the platform, funding its future development, and supporting the dedicated IndieCommerce staff who work on your behalf every day.
This adjustment is a necessary step to sustain the powerful, custom-built e-commerce platform we all rely on. It will allow us to continue investing in the tools you need to survive and thrive in a competitive online world.
We are deeply grateful for your partnership and your central role in the independent bookstore community.
Sincerely,
The IndieCommerce Team
American Booksellers Association
Please contact staff@bookweb.org for more information.