IndieCommunication: Fraud Resources, Customer Support, Bookstore Day, and Credit Card Processing

Here's the latest news from the IndieCommunication e-newsletter from the IndieCommerce team:

Catching Fraud on Your Website

Along with an increase in online sales, the IndieCommerce team has seen a corresponding increase in fraudulent online orders. We have someone monitoring fraud activity daily and have launched several new initiatives to catch fraud transactions on IndieCommerce and IndieLite websites.

If you find a fraudulent order on your website, please report it to [email protected] with “Fraud Order” in the subject line. Please also include the order number in your email. We’re compiling a list of email addresses that have been involved in fraudulent orders and are updating it on a regular basis. The list is now available for IndieCommerce and IndieLite websites to review; a BookWeb username and password are needed to see the list.

We’re trying to make it as difficult as possible to place a fraudulent order on IndieCommerce and IndieLite websites. With our network of almost 600 stores sharing online fraud information, our hope is that this new fraud report will become a valuable tool for our members.

Customer Support

Our regular Monday through Friday business hours have been extended for customer support. We also want to remind you that during weekend, holiday, and after-hours coverage, we monitor for emergency and critical outages only. See below for details.

• Regular Business Hours: 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Monday through Friday; for IndieCommerce customer support only, contact [email protected].
• Weekends, Holidays & After Hours: For Saturdays, Sundays, holidays and after hours coverage, we monitor for emergency issues only. An emergency issue means your customers can’t buy anything from your website or your staff can’t process any online orders. Your website is essentially broken and cannot take orders or process any transactions. If your website has an emergency issue, please check the IndieCommerce status page first. If your issue has not been reported, submit a critical outage report and staff will be alerted.

IndieCommerce and Independent Bookstore Day
The recording of this week’s webinar on Independent Bookstore Day is available for viewing online here. The webinar covers how to create booklists and other content for the event, how to manage IBD orders through IndieCommerce/IndieLite sites, and other resources. Also included with the video is a PDF with information about additional resources.

REMINDER: Upcoming Change to Credit Card Processing
If you have questions regarding the upcoming change to credit card processing on IndieCommerce websites, check out these frequently asked questions or the recording of a webinar presentation on this change to credit card processing. If your IndieCommerce site is still on the shared ABA credit card account and you have not already started the move to your own credit card merchant account, you are encouraged to get this transition completed by early October, before the holiday shopping rush begins.

If your bookstore is currently on IndieCommerce (not IndieLite) and you use ABA’s shared account for processing online credit card orders, we would like to help you set up your own credit card merchant account for your website as soon as possible. ABA CFO PK Sindwani has negotiated discounted credit card processing rates for ABA members with Gravitypayments.com. Find more information here.