A quick update on the status of the migration and IndieCommerce 2.0.
Over 200 stores are live on IndieCommerce 2.0 and over 100 stores are in the migration pipeline.
One of the major issues slowing down the migration is bookstores not responding to repeated inquiries about moving forward with their migration process. If stores are unable to respond to our initiation of their migration, or unable to continue moving their migration forward in a reasonably timely manner, they will be moved to the back of the queue so we can keep moving to migrate other stores.
Another slow down issue currently is stores not sharing communication from the IndieCommerce team with everyone on their team. We may suggest recording meetings with the IndieCommerce team and sharing with other staff as needed to prevent the need for multiple meetings on the same subject. We appreciate your help with this.
Some stores have requested their migration be postponed until 2025. That can be arranged, and we ask that stores convey that information to us as soon as possible.
The timeline isn’t what we anticipated because the project has grown and evolved over the past few years as we received more member feedback, the ecommerce landscape changed, and additional software updates were introduced. For example:
- IndieCommerce 1.0 was built on the Drupal 7 platform. Initially we planned to move to Drupal 8.0 for IndieCommerce 2.0. Instead, we skipped 8.0 and moved directly to Drupal 9.0 for the stores. We’ve since moved stores that were live on IC 2.0 to Drupal 10.0—a painless transition the stores didn’t even notice, one of the big advantages of Indiecommerce 2.0 going forward.
- Accessibility has always been a critical priority for ABA and the IndieCommerce platform. Over the past 2 years, we have been diligently upgrading IndieCommerce 2.0, focusing on enhancing accessibility for all users. Unfortunately, over the past 18 months, a series of frivolous ADA lawsuits have targeted small businesses, including booksellers, with claims for damages. These lawsuits can penalize stores that have genuinely accessible websites without contributing to meaningful improvements in accessibility. To address this and mitigate risks for our member stores, we have introduced additional measures to ensure accessibility and ADA compliance for our websites.
One of the many features of IndieCommerce 2.0 is a tool that we developed that ensures content creators use colors and text with specific contrast levels, making it easier for visually impaired individuals, including those who are color blind, to discern text from its background. This proactive technology helps prevent accessibility mistakes that bookstores on our platform might not have been aware of.
Additionally, the American Booksellers Association is advocating for amendments to the ADA that would make lawsuits more effective in promoting genuine website compliance by incentivizing actual fixes rather than financial settlements that primarily benefit lawyers in these cases, not plaintiffs.
- The past six months brought the new challenge of bots scrubbing sites for information and book data. This is a universal challenge for anyone on the internet right now—the problem is at an all time high and “attacks” have become more sophisticated— but with over 14 million titles available on every IC website, we have become a target for gathering book data. These bots scrape massive amounts of information quickly and in doing so can slow down a website or even take one down completely. We have been developing safeguards to stop these bots as well as employing third party services to assist us in mitigating this threat.
- In the past six months the credit card security standards for PCI compliance have become more rigorous for any websites that accept credit. Many of you have experienced changes in PCI compliance standards for in store transactions. We’ve redirected resources temporarily to ensure these new standards are being met on both indieCommerce 1.0 and 2.0 during the migration transition.
For further questions please contact [email protected].