27 May 2008 1702H

Borders.com launches!

And we’re live! Congrats at last to the Brulant team under Adam Cohen who stuck it out in Ann Arbor for the past year and change, the Deloitte guys, and the Borders e-commerce team under Kevin Ertell. All in all, pretty miraculous building up an entirely new business operation wing more or less from scratch. Hard to believe it’s been over a year since I first stepped foot into the corporate offices in Ann Arbor. I personally am going to celebrate by trying to buy books on the very systems that I worked as a user experience architect on, and of course, trying out the various flows which we had fleshed out over hours of reqs sessions.

Edit: Hmm. (Forgot how expensive Borders can be.) I also forgot we designed a flow in there for Ship to Store. Free shipping, 3-8 days! I can wait. Works good. There are some weird interactions with the site remembering me though. Did I sign in during the beta period? Must have. Thought we designed a flow in there so that when you continued as guest, you would be given a chance to save info to your account after checkout. Oh well. R6 perhaps. . . . Did we knock out gifting? Need to review the screen grabs.

The epilogue: Ordered on a Tuesday. Received ship notice Thursday. Said it would arrive by the Tuesday after. No phone call, no email. So was I to assume that one just calls the store? I could have handled that better. Instead I drifted over on Friday. The young lady working the counter seemed unfamiliar with the procedure but produced a ship-to-store binder which I signed duly, without needing to produce info, but I did anyway. And then I had my books. Done done-done done DONE. Couldn’t I use this system to send books to myself  or someone else at a Borders location somewhere else? But of course.

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5 responses to "Borders.com launches!"

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28 May 2008 0700H

Adam Cohen writes:

Hey Gene - Thanks for the thoughts and post about the launch! This is definitely a huge milestone for Borders as a company and the start of a new journey for the entire ebusiness team. Thanks again for your contributions last year as part of the project. There are certainly things to improve upon in future releases but it was so important to get the site live with a quality product first. Thanks again!

28 May 2008 0701H

K writes:

I guess this means that this is one of the things you’ve been working on recently? And does this mean that Borders is officially split from Amazon?

28 May 2008 0847H

Gino writes:

@Adam: Absolutely! There’s been some negative buzz here about how this is too little too late for Borders, but I’m going to go contrarian and say that like so many other businesses out there where the retail presence is not doing as well (Sears, Circuit City, for example), this is really about expanding the size of the pie for those retailers, which are doing pretty well online, and that Borders.com will in fact make quite a bit of money just by being out there. The ship to store and reserve in store features will in fact be quite compelling, I think — just look at this PayPal survey about how high shipping and unexpected costs are resulting in cart abandonment.

@Soobee, yes (last year, but couldn’t talk about it too much), and yes, the divorce papers are signed.

30 May 2008 0722H

K writes:

It’s very pretty. I like the bookshelves.

08 Jun 2008 1037H

Tim writes:

Congratulations! I like the magic shelf/quickview feature.

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