This release features few highly requested additions, feature updates and bug resolutions.

New Functionality

• Customizable Cart and Checkout Messages: Stores can configure multiple custom alerts or informational messages that are dynamically managed via specific rule-based Conditions. This advanced capability assists in notifying customers about free delivery thresholds, highlighting important shipment deadlines, promoting gift ideas, and displaying important promotional updates during checkout. Set up these messages and alerts by accessing Dashboard > Commerce > E-Commerce settings > Checkout Messages (This new setting is listed between Custom Checkout Panes and Custom Messages.) Additional details are outlined in the help documentation. 

• Content Anchor Links: Enables direct linking to specific sections within text fields across pages, landing pages, catalogs, event listings, staff recommendations, and blog entries. This functionality is particularly beneficial for navigating extensive policy pages and multi-part content pages. Steps are outlined in the help documentation.

• Checkout Surcharges: Allows stores to apply custom surcharges, such as a Living Wage Fee, during checkout. Multiple distinct fees can be created with unique criteria. This update will be a soft launch with select partner stores. 
• XML Sitemap Redesign: An upgraded, optimized sitemap generator for improved site indexing.

Enhancements & Updates

• Event Tags: Store staff and Content Editors can now view all available tags in a pop-up modal window during event setup (creating or editing events), functioning like Order Tags. Clicking the "Show Available Tags" link opens the modal displaying the tags along with their assigned colors, while omitting tag descriptions to keep the list clean.
• Preferred Name Field Description: Stores can now insert customized explanatory text beneath the Preferred Name entry field during checkout to clarify its intended purpose. Site Administrators can configure this description via Dashboard > Commerce > E-commerce Settings > Customer Information. This custom explanatory note also displays prominently within the user account dashboard. 

• Disabled Shipping Methods: Inactive/un published shipping methods are moved to a dedicated tab separate from active options, streamlining management for site administrators.

• Product SKUs in Activity Logs: Adjusting item quantities or updating titles on active orders now captures and records the corresponding product ISBN or SKU directly within the order activity logs. 

Bug Resolutions

• Shipping Rate Recalculation: Prevents shipping rate requoting when adding tracking information to existing orders. Shipment costs are now recalculated exclusively when order modifications impact shipping costs.
• Payments on Settled Orders: Adding payments to fully paid orders now presents a message stating no balance remains, replacing the previous access denied warning.
• Order Tag Hex Codes: Hides color hex values when assigning order tags to eliminate store confusion.
• E-Gift Card Notifications: Corrects grammar within automated e-gift card communications.

This release features few highly requested additions, feature updates, bug resolutions, and ADA compliance remediations.

ADA Accessibility Remediation

In response to the August 2026 accessibility audit of IndieCommerce, we are continuing our rollout of recommended enhancements. Building on initial fixes from the previous release, this update addresses 10 additional remediations. Check the Development Roadmap for details.

Drupal Core Maintenance

This update keeps contributed modules aligned with current stable releases as part of routine platform maintenance. Drupal core has been upgraded to the latest secure version 11.13.19

New Functionality

• Best Books for Young Readers: The 2026 online catalog is available on all IC sites and can be accessed by appending /catalog/abc to the website URL. The catalog can be linked to from the CTA blocks, navigation icons and the main menu.

Enhancements & Updates

Events

• The default duration for new events is 1 hour instead of 15 minutes. 
• The primary store location is selected by default for all In-Store events.
• Ability to hide published events from site calendars, event lists, and carousels.

Book Variations: 

• Schedule publishing and unpublishing for individual book variations.
• An option to disable Media Mail per variation, overriding standard platform default (which is all variations are eligible for Media Mail)
• Enhance the bulk upload mechanism to reduce processing errors and retain update timestamps.

• Address Verification Optimization: Integration with USPS API is optimized through extended caching and skipping internal store addresses to minimize lookup expenses.
• Admin Interface Copy Updates: 
  • Update the 'Customer' filter field label to 'Customer Email' across main admin order displays - Orders, Orders by SKU, Cart, Draft
  • Clarify action button messaging in comment panels to 'Add Admin Comment' and 'Sent Comment to Customer'.

• Customer Roles Display: Orders placed by customers with customer roles (when the orders are placed as logged in users) will include the customer role alongside order details in administrative views.

• POS EDI Integration: Order status filters are expanded to include iMRCHNT POS statuses across all filtering menus. (For sites using the iMRCHNT POS EDI feature)
• Reporting Enhancements: 
  • In the Sales Report by SKU, stores can choose between an exact match or a partial ‘Contains’ filter option for SKUs.
  • In the Sales Report by SKU, if the product has preference forms (Services, Book Variations etc.), the response values are separated by pipe separators for better formatting. 
  • For all reports with a date column, the day of the week is removed from the date format to allow sorting by date in the downloaded CSV file.

Bug Resolutions

• Footer Newsletter Form: Fixed an issue where the footer newsletter signup block was inadvertently omitted in a prior release.
• CDF Order Notifications: Cleaned up email notifications for Ingram order cancellations and shipments by stripping unparsed HTML markup.
• Order Management Shortcuts: Addressed errors on the dashboard shortcut views whenever associated order tags or shipping methods are deleted.
• Admin Scrollbars: Restored the horizontal scrollbar display across admin screens for Windows desktop users.

This release features few highly requested additions, feature updates, bug resolutions, and ADA compliance remediations.

ADA Accessibility Remediation

Following an accessibility audit performed in August 2026 across the IndieCommerce system, our team began incorporating recommended improvements. A selection of these compliance updates is included in this release.

Drupal Core Maintenance

This update keeps contributed modules aligned with current stable releases as part of routine platform maintenance.

New Functionality

• Multi-Day Events: Enables stores to schedule multi-day events across several days on the calendar. 'Multi-Day' is now integrated as a new option within available event types. To set up a multi-day event, navigate to Dashboard > Create > Event > Multi-Day Event. Additional instructions are provided in the help documentation. 

• Design Preview: If you want to try a new logo in a different header option,  a new color scheme or a different font, the Preview offers a basic layout preview when building and setting up new designs. The Preview button is available at the bottom of the design page, next to the Save button. 

Enhancements & Updates

• Permission Updates for Webforms: Site administrators can configure the webform ‘Access’ setting to limit access by admin or customer roles. 

• Refresh Book Data: An option to refresh book data for admins. This feature is particularly useful if recent book modifications are not reflected. Please use it sparingly, only when needed. 

• Sales Report by SKU: Displays cumulative units sold and total revenue at the top of the report view.

• Sales Report: Includes order subtotals, standardizes exported date formatting for sorting, and reorganizes column layouts to enhance overall readability

Bug Resolutions

• Home Page Event Carousels: Fixes an issue with rendering images for mobile users.
• Multiple Shipments: Resolves a glitch where duplicate shipments were generated during checkout, though only one is linked to the order. This correction eliminates resulting discrepancies in reporting and shipping exports.
• E-Commerce Settings: Addresses a recent regression to save changes to the e-commerce preferences.
• Bulk Receipt Naming: Bulk-printed order and gift receipts will now generate accurate filenames rather than defaulting to the final order number in the batch.
• Admin Comments: Line breaks will now be preserved when store staff enter notes on orders.

This release includes an important and necessary update to Drupal Commerce, feature updates and bug fixes.

Drupal Commerce Maintenance

This release includes an important and necessary update to Drupal Commerce, Shipping, Gift Card, and USPS modules. These enhancements keep the platform current with the latest releases while maintaining backward compatibility for IndieCommerce stores.

New Functionality

• Book Search Results: The results page for book searches will include the binding type and ISBN. The publication date will be displayed for pre-order titles. 

• Secondary Search Placement: On Browse Book pages, stores can choose to display the secondary search form at the top of the page. 

Enhancements & Updates

• Standard Event Layout: For newly launched IndieCommerce websites, a single-column layout will be set as the default template. This will not affect the selection made on existing sites.
• Stock Information Pane: Stores can configure the Stock Information pane on the order to remain open by default when order item quantities are less than a specified threshold. 

• Order Items: Within the admin order view, the Order Items tab will display the ISBN or SKU for every product included in the order. 

Bug Resolutions

• Site Announcements will remain visible even after a site alert is dismissed. This fix addresses a known issue identified on websites using the 'Search' header.
• Following the recent fraud detection update, non-critical checks were erroneously listed with actual warnings. These entries will be filtered out to make the warning list accurate.
• New validations are implemented for bulk processing of order tags to prevent system errors during the update.

This is a short release to address Drupal core updates and a couple of feature enhancements.

Drupal Core Maintenance

As part of an ongoing effort to remain current with Drupal releases, the platform was upgraded to version 11.3.16. This patch-level update primarily addresses bug fixes within the core system. Various contributed modules will also be updated to their most recent stable versions.

New Functionality

• Shareable Coupon Links: Store admins can now generate unique URLs for specific coupon codes to be distributed via email marketing. Upon following the link, the corresponding discount is automatically added to the customer’s cart. A "Copy" function is available to quickly capture the link for external use.

Enhancements & Updates

• iMRCHNT EDI Order Synchronization: Stores utilizing this integration can add or delete order shipments during every phase of the fulfillment process, such as those in "Pending POS" or "Accepted by POS" statuses.

Bug Resolutions

• Event Location Removal Redirects: Upon the deletion of stored Event Locations (Dashboard > Manage > Events > Event Locations), admins will be automatically rerouted back to the main Event Locations list view rather than being returned to the homepage.

This release includes new features,  feature updates and bug fixes.

New Functionality

• Cookie and Consent Management : A new cookie and consent manager is enabled on all websites. This will gate the platform's third-party scripts behind prior consent: Google Analytics under an Analytics toggle, and the marketing services (WithFriends, Book2Look) under a single Third party services toggle. Customers will not be able to opt out cookies that are required to run the website, place orders etc. IndieCommerce sites using third party services like Book2Look and WithFriends should plan to update their Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy pages.
• Orders with Square payment eligible for Ingram CDF: For sites using Square for credit card payments, orders placed using credit card will be eligible for Ingram Customer Direct Fulfillment (the fulfillment option that uses ABA’s Ingram account). Other existing Ingram CDF requirements apply.

Updates & Improvements

• Fraud Rules: The following new fraud rules  added to improve the fraud detection logic. 
  • The customer's IP geolocation does not match shipping and billing addresses: 5 points
  • Customer account created within 3 hours of the order placement time: 1 point
  • Phone number area code does not align with shipping and billing addresses: 2 points
  • Order created by store staff: -20 points
• Reports and Batch API: All reports that include large order volumes with multiple order statuses and order products will utilize Drupal’s Batch Processing approach to avoid timeouts and performance issues. Reports included in this update are Sales Summary, Custom Sales Summary, Sales Per Year, Product Sales Summary and Weekly Bestseller. Other reports were already being generated using batch processing.
• Illustrators for Books: The illustrator name, where available (mostly children’s books), will be listed with the author name for search results, browse books, product lists, blogs, event related titles. The illustrator was previously displayed on the book product page.
• Date format for admin pages: Date format for customer facing pages were addressed in a previous code update. A similar fix (removing leading zeroes in date and time format) is applied for admin facing pages as well.
• Bulk Upload of Store Merchandise: More updates to the bulk upload of store merchandise specifically addressing image uploads
• Tax Report - Tax Report will include the street address and city associated with the order (as requested by many stores). This information will be available for future orders.
• BLK Bestsellers List - The banner is updated to match the other ABA curated lists

Bug Fixes

• Tax Exempt Customers: Resolves the following 2 bugs
  • When a store rejected a customer's tax-exempt request and the customer fixed their details and resubmits, nothing happened. The updated submission was not processed.
  • Uploading the exemption PDF triggered a "Password field is required" error that blocked the save for customers who weren't changing their password and the store admins were falsely notified.
• Image Row 2 for Tier 1 Sites: Image Row 2 is a Tier 2 feature and is removed from the homepage configuration for Tier 2 sites
• Leading and trailing spaces in address fields: When customers accidentally include a space while entering the billing and shipping address, the ‘billing and shipping addresses don't match” warning was triggered interfering with address validation and fraud detection. Spaces in the address fields are trimmed to avoid such false warnings.
• Modal Pop-ups: Fixes the modal popups across the platform that currently look cropped on the ipad and mobile devices.
• Optional preference form fields: For product types that support preference form fields, a field can be optional. When customers skip the optional field, their selections for the subsequent fields were not saved during checkout. Labels for optional fields will also be listed with a ‘-’ for value as part of addressing this issue.
• Gift Cards and E-Gift Cards: When a Gift Card or E-Gift Card is added to the cart, the display order of From, To, Delivery Date, and Message will be consistent across all the checkout pages and on the order.

This release includes new features,  feature updates, security updates and bug fixes.

New Functionality

• AALBC and Black Book Accelerator Bestsellers: Every IndieCommerce website will feature the monthly BLK Bestsellers list, highlighting top titles from Black writers and artists nationwide. Curated by the African American Literature Book Club and the Black Book Accelerator, this automated feature functions similarly to the Indie Next or weekly Bestseller lists. Updates occur by the third week of the month and can be linked via /blk-bestsellers-list or /blk-bestsellers. While individual lists are ready for use on homepages, we recommend waiting until the week of August 10 for full promotion as final landing page refinements are completed.

• Webform Custom Composites: Bookstores can implement custom form fields that provide users with an "Add one more" functionality during the submission process. 

Updates & Improvements

• Order Invoices: Invoices and receipts will include the preferred contact method for customers, and all customer data in the upper right header will be styled in bold.

• Advanced POS Integration (iMRCHNT): There are several enhancements to the integration between an IndieCommerce website and iMRCHNT POS for syncing of orders and order updates in both directions. 
  • Online orders flagged as suspicious by the fraud detection system will not be exported to the POS. Store staff are required  to review the online order and decide if the order is fraudulent or not. Orders determined to be not fraudulent will be exported to the POS.
  • The phone number entered by the customer in the Customer Information checkout pane is included with the shipping and billing addresses.
  • When purchases are made from a product list or catalog, the referral data for the product list / catalog is included in the exported file. Stores can use this data to track sales from particular product lists or catalogs.
  • Formatting for currency in book prices, order totals etc. will be consistent.
  • Bulk processing capabilities have been removed to avoid errors.

• Shipping Method Descriptions: The "Rate Description" field used to include additional information about a shipping method was previously visible to costumes only for pickup orders. Now, this information is visible to customers during checkout for all shipping methods.

• USPS Shipping Logic: Administrators can apply specific conditions to USPS real-time rate delivery methods for better logistical control. The same set of conditions that were available for flat rate shipping methods are available for USPS Realtime shipping options as well.

• Drupal Contrib Module Synchronization: Various community-contributed Drupal modules upgraded to match stable versions.

Security & Performance

• Product Recommendations: The logic behind the ‘You May Also Like’ carousel on book product pages was resource intensive resulting in performance issues. This is now optimized to ensure a smoother user experience and resolve previous latency concerns.

Bug Fixes

• SKU-Based Reporting: Sales and order reports now utilize exact string matching for specific SKUs, preventing the inclusion of products that merely contain the search term. This change will be reflected on these 2 reports
  • Dashboard > Commerce > Manage Orders > Order by SKU
  • Dashboard > Commerce > Reports > Sales Report by SKU

• Event Location Management: Critical white page errors encountered during the deletion of event locations have been successfully resolved. This change will be reelected on  Dashboard > Manage > Events > Event Locations

• Product Attribute Uniqueness: Fixes to attribute-combination validation allow bookstores to seamlessly create merchandise both with and without variations, eliminating previous "must be unique" error blocks.

• LSI Content Rendering: Character encoding issues within LSI "Section" fields have been addressed, ensuring special characters display correctly rather than as raw HTML snippets.

This release includes Drupal core update,  feature updates, bug fixes.

Updates & Improvements

Drupal Platform Upgrade: To ensure alignment with current stable releases, IndieCommerce 2.0 has been upgraded from Drupal 11.2.12 to Drupal 11.3.12.

Expanded Book Availability Visibility: Availability statuses, such as "On our shelves" or "Shipped in 2 - 5 Business Days," are now visible across all book listings. This includes Search results, Product Lists, Catalogs, Blogs, Events, and Browse Book pages.

Advanced POS Integration: Stores utilizing the iMRCHNT POS now have access to expanded order management tools. After an order syncs to the POS, staff can modify items, process refunds, and handle sales tax directly on the website.

Bug Fixes

Handling of Invalid Book Metadata: We have resolved an issue where books failed to load due to invalid age or grade range data. The system now ignores incorrect metadata, allowing the book to load successfully to the site.

This release includes  feature updates and bug fixes.

Enhancements & Updates

Product Page Format Drop-down: The book formats presented in the Available Formats menu are now dynamically determined by each store's unique fulfillment configurations. Stores electing to sell ’All Books’ will display all possible formats, whereas those restricting sales to warehouse stock will only list formats currently available at a warehouse.

Event Carousels: This update applies to stores with multiple locations. The event Location on the carousel will include the name of the store location, appended to ‘In Store’. 

Staff Review Taxonomy Page: This automated page gathers book reviews associated with specific staff review tags. The update ensures the name of the staff member who wrote the review is now prominently displayed alongside the content 

Custom SKUs: All product types - Store Merchandise, Non-Shippable Store Merchandise, Gift Cards, Services and Book Variations will support hyphens, underscores and periods in their custom SKUs

Webform Privacy Settings: Specific element fields within webforms can now be designated as Private. This functionality allows stores to append internal-only data to submissions, ensuring that these administrative details remain hidden from the customers who originally completed the form.

Bug Resolutions

Event Carousels: The country name which was previously included as part of the address is now removed. 

Staff Review Taxonomy Page: This automated page aggregates reviews associated with specific staff review tags. Previously, when multiple reviewers shared critiques for the same title under an identical tag, a single entry would repeat, effectively hiding other staff contributions. This update resolves the duplication issue, ensuring all individual reviews are now correctly displayed.

Sales Report: Resolves an issue with sales report that was crashing when shipment on an order was corrupted

Store Merchandise Image: The option to close the pop-up modal when a store merchandise image is clicked is restored

Store Merchandise Bulk Upload: Addresses a couple of issues with the bulk upload of store merchandise, especially issues related to very large files. The images are now uploaded in smaller batches.

This release includes new features, feature updates and bug resolutions.

New Functionality

USPS Real Time Quotes: (Tier 2 Only) If you have an USPS account for your store, you can integrate your IndieCommerce website with your USPS account to retrieve shipping quotes in real time when customers go through checkout on your site. By connecting directly to USPS Webtools, the quotes for these rates will be based on product weights and will adjust based on the total weight of the package.

Image Rows (Tier 2 Only): Stores can now utilize an additional homepage section for image rows, allowing for a configuration of up to three rows with four images per individual row.

Enhancements & Updates

CC Refund Form Validation: When processing partial refunds for captured credit card charges, the system now automatically populates the field with the correct refund amount. This replaces the previous behavior where the field defaulted to the entire captured amount.

POS Integration: Integration between IndieCommerce and iMRCHNT POS will have additional filters for shipping methods to offer more options for syncing of orders with the POS, Also, stores will have access to edit  Payments, Order Items and Shipments for these orders.

Pricing Rule Exclusions: A new configuration allows stores to omit books that have already been marked down via existing pricing rules from further discounts.

Bug Resolutions

LSI stock info on product pages: Resolved an issue where switching between product variations (such as size options for apparel) could cause the Stock Information panel to disappear. This occurred specifically when moving from a variation with LSI data to one without, and then returning to the original stocked item; the panel will now correctly reappear without requiring a manual page refresh.

POS Order Export Date Filter Validation: Fixes a white page error when invalid date formats are entered in the POS export date range filter. This also improves the help text for POS export filter fields on the ecommerce settings page. Previously, the Include/Exclude sections and their sub-fields had vague or missing descriptions, making it unclear how filters interact with each other.

Bulk upload of Store merchandise: Resolves an issue that could cause the Store Merchandise Upload Form to fail