The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) is to replace its existing sales data services with a new, enhanced program, Pubtrack.

Launched in partnership with R.R. Bowker and Information Resource Technology (IRT), Pubtrack is scheduled to begin operating in May, ECPA announced yesterday. The organization is to unveil the new service's features at CBA Advance this week.

Pubtrack will replace ECPA's STATS (Sales Tracking Analysis Trends Summary) and STATS+ programs, which gather sales data from more than 600 Christian retail stores across the country.

Pubtrack will “take industry sales data analysis to a whole new level, making it accessible, functional and customized,” said Kelly Gallagher, ECPA's vice president of business development. “Pubtrack will set the industry standard and is unlike any other sales data program available in any industry.”

Among the improvements are peer-to-peer access points that will allow publishers and retailers to share detailed sales and performance data “to make more meaningful decisions about product demand and replenishment,” ECPA said.

The Web-based service also will enable tracking of specific products by ISBN from printing to distribution and sales, and “significantly upgrades the functionality and performance” of previous STATS services with new ability to sort and filter customized reports.

Pubtrack tests are already underway with several key Christian retailers, publishers and distributors, ECPA said. Operating on a new platform already running in the Canadian marketplace, Pubtrack is specifically designed to improve data collection and analysis for both publishers and retailers while simultaneously protecting data integrity and confidentiality, ECPA said.

Gallagher told Christian Retailing that Pubtrack had been in development for more than a year, before the fall announcement by CBA of its new sales data service, CROSS:SCAN. The retailers group said it was introducing the service in response to members' calls for “broader collection, better interpretation and more-controlled usage of sales data from across the (Christian retail) channel.”

Gallagher said previous versions of STATS “needed more value for retailers.” Pubtrack's peer-to-peer access capability “meets this need head-on, and will also foster a greater level of communication and trust between retailers and publishers.”

Launched in 2000, STATS has 60-plus publisher subscribers, with sales data available to all reporting retail stores. Introduced last year with enhanced features that made manipulation of data easier, STATS+ has 20-plus publisher subscribers.

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