Borders Swims Back Out Of The Amazon To The Web

by Gregory Sullivan — Tuesday, May 27, 2008, 01:00 PM EDT

Internet years go by fast. Way back in ancient web history --2001-- Borders books thought it was a good idea to ally themselves with a fast-growing web portal called Amazon.com. Perhaps you've heard of it. I'm sure it seemed like an interesting sideline revenue stream to Borders enormous brick-and-mortar book sales at the time. Borders has now finally woken up to the fact that Amazon is basically putting Borders' regular stores out of business, and they're trying to recapture sales revenue currently lost to the Internet by launching their own e-commerce site, borders.com.

“The decision to partner with Amazon, at the time it was made, was made I think for very good reasons,” said Kevin Ertell, the vice president for e-business at Borders. “Now the world has changed significantly. It’s right for us now to own our own e-commerce experience and to tie into stores and really connect with our customers in a way we could not do in a partnership with another company.”

The new Borders site offers plenty to like, such as the Flash video-based “magic shelf” on the main page that recreates the experience of browsing the tables of new books at the entrance to stores. The site also ties in with the Borders reward card program and the physical book search kiosks in most Borders outlets, and offers video of author book signings and book discussion groups.

HotHardware would love to tell you all about how swell or lousy the new website is, but it locked up our browser solid and we had to bail out. So until Mozilla fixes Firefox 3, or Borders fixes their website, our advice to our readers is to watch television or play Halo 3.

Tags: Amazon, Web, MS, order, Borders, swim, AMA, Border, AC, IM, AM, K

Borders Swims Back Out Of The Amazon To The Web

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