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Goodbye Amazon: Borders’ Online Store Is the New Face of E-Commerce

8 points by waderoush 18y ago

jobeirne 18y ago
No dice. Too overbearing and flashy... Swear to god, no pun intended.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Yep, Amazon has absolutely nothing to worry about. This looks and behaves like a CD-ROM from 1997. Vast amounts of slow-loading overdesigned chartjunk. The home page is stuffed with lovingly Photoshopped filler material, author photos, and the covers of books. It does seem like a great website for people who don't like to read. A search on "Wallace Stevens" at borders.com brings me to this page: http://www.borders.com/online/store/SearchResults?keyword=wallace+stevens&type=0&simple=1 http://www.borders.com/online/store/SearchResults?keyword=wa... Prices are shown for only three books. The rest are shown as covers only; to see prices or titles you have to hover over them and wait for the slow-zooming JS popup. No user ratings anywhere, possibly because this site is ten years late to the party and doesn't have a database of user ratings like Amazon's. No used-book prices. You can get to a used-book site from Borders, but it comes complete with a warning popup (!) which tells you that it's a separate site requiring a separate login. The equivalent Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8248473-4108915?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=wallace+stevens&x=0&y=0 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8248473-4108915?url... ... makes it instantly apparent that Amazon's new-book prices are 20 to 40% lower... to say nothing of the used book prices, which are right there for comparison. The best that can be said for this site is that it may have met its primary design criterion: "Do not be Amazon, and make sure people know that we're not Amazon."
jonknee 18y ago
A Flash interface is not going to help kill Amazon. Lower prices and faster shipping would. Amazon massacres the new Borders on price. Not to mention selecting "Books" on the top menu gets me an error message on a blank page: > This page can't be displayed due to a security violation. Contact support for additional information I can just see Amazon quivering.
- timcederman 18y ago
  Especially not a flash interface that prompts you to upgrade to Flash 9, when your browser works just fine on every other major site out there.
joao 18y ago
Looks too much like Delicious Library (http://delicious-monster.com http://delicious-monster.com)
- pkaler 18y ago
  That's a bad thing? I love Delicious Library. Stuff like the bookshelf, coverflow, and seeing a visual representation of items does actually have value.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Yeah, that's obviously the source of their mistake. The problem, though, is that Delicious Library is designed to solve a completely different problem. Delicious Library can afford to lead off with a beautiful display of the covers of my books because I don't need to see an information-dense, quick-loading set of prices, reviews, popularity indexes, and text samples for books that I already own. In fact, the last thing I want to see when I launch Delicious Library is a detailed page of data which summarizes how much I overpaid for my books, or how crappy my taste is compared to the average. What I really want from Delicious Library is a big screenful of my stuff that looks good and makes me feel proud of my collection. I'm sure that Borders executives feel the same way. Now they can look at their website and be confident that, by god, they've got great taste in books, designers, and photographers!
agotterer 18y ago
Click the "books" link... "Error This page can't be displayed due to a security violation. Contact support for additional information" But the magic book scrolling thing on the homepage is pretty nice.
chaostheory 18y ago
has the blog author actually visited Amazon recently? Amazon is a lot more than just books, music, and dvds now. I can think of a lot of product categories borders doesn't even touch, let alone specific products. O yeah - Amazon isn't the only company selling stuff on its website... this post seems more like a paid PR piece than anything enlightening. I don't even know how this story even got past 1 vote
lurkage 18y ago
Ouch. I feel bad for Xconomy. They're going to be wishing they could pull this headline back.
jakewolf 18y ago
I'm an Amazon Prime addict. Need I say more? You can get a brand new copy of "The Rails Way" for $18.50 less on amazon. I checked the number of customer reviews for a few different books and most Border's books have few to none while amazon's have many to 100's.
maximilian 18y ago
It seems nice, but my old 1ghz powerbook hates flash more than i do, so they won't get any love from me until i get a new computer.
projectileboy 18y ago
I believe this is what they would call a "hit" in the public relations world.

8 points by waderoush 18y ago

jobeirne 18y ago

No dice. Too overbearing and flashy... Swear to god, no pun intended.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Yep, Amazon has absolutely nothing to worry about. This looks and behaves like a CD-ROM from 1997. Vast amounts of slow-loading overdesigned chartjunk. The home page is stuffed with lovingly Photoshopped filler material, author photos, and the covers of books. It does seem like a great website for people who don't like to read. A search on "Wallace Stevens" at borders.com brings me to this page: http://www.borders.com/online/store/SearchResults?keyword=wallace+stevens&type=0&simple=1 http://www.borders.com/online/store/SearchResults?keyword=wa... Prices are shown for only three books. The rest are shown as covers only; to see prices or titles you have to hover over them and wait for the slow-zooming JS popup. No user ratings anywhere, possibly because this site is ten years late to the party and doesn't have a database of user ratings like Amazon's. No used-book prices. You can get to a used-book site from Borders, but it comes complete with a warning popup (!) which tells you that it's a separate site requiring a separate login. The equivalent Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8248473-4108915?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=wallace+stevens&x=0&y=0 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8248473-4108915?url... ... makes it instantly apparent that Amazon's new-book prices are 20 to 40% lower... to say nothing of the used book prices, which are right there for comparison. The best that can be said for this site is that it may have met its primary design criterion: "Do not be Amazon, and make sure people know that we're not Amazon."

jonknee 18y ago

A Flash interface is not going to help kill Amazon. Lower prices and faster shipping would. Amazon massacres the new Borders on price. Not to mention selecting "Books" on the top menu gets me an error message on a blank page: > This page can't be displayed due to a security violation. Contact support for additional information I can just see Amazon quivering.

timcederman 18y ago
Especially not a flash interface that prompts you to upgrade to Flash 9, when your browser works just fine on every other major site out there.

joao 18y ago

Looks too much like Delicious Library (http://delicious-monster.com http://delicious-monster.com)

pkaler 18y ago
That's a bad thing? I love Delicious Library. Stuff like the bookshelf, coverflow, and seeing a visual representation of items does actually have value.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
Yeah, that's obviously the source of their mistake. The problem, though, is that Delicious Library is designed to solve a completely different problem. Delicious Library can afford to lead off with a beautiful display of the covers of my books because I don't need to see an information-dense, quick-loading set of prices, reviews, popularity indexes, and text samples for books that I already own. In fact, the last thing I want to see when I launch Delicious Library is a detailed page of data which summarizes how much I overpaid for my books, or how crappy my taste is compared to the average. What I really want from Delicious Library is a big screenful of my stuff that looks good and makes me feel proud of my collection. I'm sure that Borders executives feel the same way. Now they can look at their website and be confident that, by god, they've got great taste in books, designers, and photographers!

agotterer 18y ago

Click the "books" link... "Error This page can't be displayed due to a security violation. Contact support for additional information" But the magic book scrolling thing on the homepage is pretty nice.

chaostheory 18y ago

has the blog author actually visited Amazon recently? Amazon is a lot more than just books, music, and dvds now. I can think of a lot of product categories borders doesn't even touch, let alone specific products. O yeah - Amazon isn't the only company selling stuff on its website... this post seems more like a paid PR piece than anything enlightening. I don't even know how this story even got past 1 vote

lurkage 18y ago

Ouch. I feel bad for Xconomy. They're going to be wishing they could pull this headline back.

jakewolf 18y ago

I'm an Amazon Prime addict. Need I say more? You can get a brand new copy of "The Rails Way" for $18.50 less on amazon. I checked the number of customer reviews for a few different books and most Border's books have few to none while amazon's have many to 100's.

maximilian 18y ago

It seems nice, but my old 1ghz powerbook hates flash more than i do, so they won't get any love from me until i get a new computer.

projectileboy 18y ago

I believe this is what they would call a "hit" in the public relations world.