Variable Markup

After the much talked about change of Borders using Amazon.com to host their site, Borders releases their new beta site.   At first glance the site has a nice design. 

The first thing I noticed was the “Magic  Book Shelf” and immediately got my hopes up for something really cool and useful.  Unfortunately, it’s a Flash object consisting of a static set of books, movies, and music that scrolls through 2-3 pages of 5 books per page.  There was no way of going deeper beyond the initial set of chosen books and navigation is unintuitive to say the least.  I kept trying to drag the focus on the bookshelf to other areas with no effect and found that only selecting the listed menu items on the right had any affect.   It does have a “picked for you” feature once you sign in.  I found the feature to be unhelpful in discovering new books, but hopefully that’s because I don’t have a large purchase history for them to mine from and it will improve with time. 

The site sports a faceted search navigation menu on the left.  Although I was surprised to not find facets for a couple common categories in the fiction section like mystery or true crime.   Also listing the number of books besides the facet is a bit scary with 6293 Action & Adventure books yet only a 122 “Classics”.   I found that when clicking on the Action section, I could only drill down further by format, special features(Abridged, Annotated, Large Print, etc.), price and Best Sellers.  

The power from my perspective in having faceted navigation is drilling down through a large number of product in the specific facets that mean something to me like author facets (Clancy vs. Ludlum) and finer genres like Spy books,  WWII Military, Viet Nam Military, etc..  It seems like they are getting the consumer to 6,293 books and then pushing them off the cliff to find what they want. 

Another interesting section of the Borders beta is the media section which includes sections on Harry Potter, Bill Clinton’s new book, Advice for Living, and a book club.  Each section has various high quality videos and audio pieces on the subject produced by Borders.    This is definitely interesting, but I would have liked to have seen a more social community environment where videos and audio produced by Harry Potter Fans would be shown.  Or at least shown next to the Borders content. 

 Available to Promise and Reservation of a product is a new welcomed addition.  This has been one of my biggest frustrations with book retailers, in that there hasn’t been a way to find the closest store that has the book I want in stock so I can pick it up in the next couple hours.  Borders provides the ability to enter zip, city & state to find the book you are currently viewing the details on.  It then tells you if they don’t have it(special order required) or that it’s “Likely in Stock”.    If you select the reserve button, it will send the request to the store and it tells you that you’ll receive an email back to let you know that it is in fact in stock and being held for you.  It says that the email is usually returned in 2 hours. 

On the product details page, a small comment is under the price listed stating that the prices may vary by store.  From a multichannel perspective, it’s dissappointing and confusing that the prices could vary.  In this day and age, why would you charge different prices for the same book in two stores in the same area?  If you have to charge differently at each store, list the price next to the availability. 

It is in a beta stage, so I would hope that it will change prior to full launch, however I can’t help but feel the product detail pages are very sparce compared to competitors.  Beyond the manufacturer data, reviews are short and seldomly found, and functionality I’ve come to expect such as “Customers who bought this, also bought this” or “this is better together with this” is nonexistant.

Surprisingly enough, the site didn’t do a great job of making the page very optimized for organic search.  They could have easily done simplified URL’s listing the book title and instead chose to use SKU#.  They also have quite a few validation issues in the CSS & HTML, but I’m sure that will be worked out by the time they go live. 

If anyone checks it out, I’d love to hear what you think.