November 22 2007

Borders to split from Amazon

Borders are to leave the umbrella of Amazon and are striking out on their own with their first UK and US transactional web site. Will it be too late to get market share?

Borders UK and Borders US are set to launch new transactional websites next Spring, ending the tie-in with Amazon. The company has commissioned online communications business Tangent Labs to build and run a new transactional website, allowing customers to buy directly from Borders for the first time. The launch of the site will mark the end of Borders' agreement with Amazon, which previously provided the company's online retail service.

The new Borders website, due to launch in spring 2008, will list more than one million products. Tangent will be responsible for the design, creation and management of the website, which will contain a bespoke search engine and community areas for customers in addition to online shopping – initially covering books, CDs, DVDs, and computer games.

The contract was awarded to Tangent following a competitive five way pitch. Earlier this year Tangent implemented www.borderslocal.co.uk a satellite site that enables 70 stores across the UK and Ireland to manage their own personalised pages to better grab their local customers.

While the temptation to go under the umbrella of a bigger organisation like Amazon must have been very tempting for Borders the result is that Borders have probably lost a lot of customers to Amazon.

To build their online presence this late in the game may be a problem although Borders seems to be going about it in the right way. In the US as part of the push to get their customers to forget the Amazon site they have developed a ‘beta’ of what the site will look like http://beta.BordersStores.com and they’ve developed a site for potential users to “post their thoughts and suggestions” http://BordersBeta.Gather.com

While beta sites are a good idea they’re not going to win them market share overnight. However the one thing that Borders have, that could help them regain the lost users is an incredibly good database of purchasers. Over the last few years Borders have been building up an email list from shop customers that’s the envy of many book retailers. The US email list has hundreds of thousands of happy purchasers on it and is actively used to push promotions in shops, so, hopefully when they do go live with their new site they will exploit the list as much as possible.

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)