Can Borders take on Amazon? Borders recently parted ways with Amazon and started their own online store. This move allows Borders to shape their own online identity and to stop enriching their competitor. However, can Borders be successful on their own?

Amazon is not successful only because they sell a whole lot of stuff. Certainly, they do, and the name “Amazon” springs to mind for many people when they want to buy books online. Rather, Amazon has successfully harvested hours of free labor from their customers by getting them to rate and review books (who doesn’t check out the reviews before buying something?). Using Amazon to shop is valuable because so many other people have used it–the network effect at work.

In addition, their affiliates program lets bloggers refer their readers to Amazon to buy books. This arrangement makes Amazon money, and the blogger gets a commission. Amazon also offers an eCommerce API, letting people make use of Amazon’s product data and functionality. These are important factors in Amazon’s success, but this post will just focus on the customer reviews and ratings.

So what’s Borders to do in order to compete with Amazon? There’s nothing on their home page that explicitly tells me why I should buy anything from them instead of from Amazon (or anyone else). The prices seem comparable and it’s hard to improve on the quality of Amazon’s customer service–you buy a book and it just shows up at your door. As I mentioned earlier, Amazon is full of ratings and reviews, whereas Borders is full of unreviewed and unrated merchandise.

Borders has an advantage through their bricks and mortar stores which they are clearly trying to use. Their website makes the implicit promise that your experience in a physical Borders location will be extended onto the web. For example, Borders stores regularly get authors and musicians to visit and promote their work. They seem to want to bring this experience to their website through video.

Their “magic bookshelf” is also a bid to bring the experience of browsing shelves online. Actually, across the whole site, Borders has clearly got to supply an equal or superior user experience, and the “magic bookshelf” is probably part of this effort. Usability and good design are areas where they could try to take the advantage over Amazon, although it appears that they have chosen not to do so.

Borders also hopes to entice shoppers with their rewards program. I can’t really speak to how well this will work since I’m not a member, but I include it for the sake of exhaustiveness.

Will these strategies work? We shall see how well their physical stores support the website. I propose that ratings and reviews are a decisive factor. Borders should try and encourage the people buying things at their stores to then hop online and review the things they just bought. Another idea would be to set aside time for the staff at their stores to go online and write reviews. This would give their staff another outlet for their love of books, music, or movies, and would help get the ball rolling on their website. As a customer, looking at the reviews on books would be like going into the store itself and chatting with an employee and getting a recommendation. They can have reviews from real people that exist at an actual store in addition to the reviews from Some Random Person on the Internet.

It’s going to take time to build up an amount of ratings and reviews comparable to Amazon, and on top of that they must convince reviewers that it is worth doing it on the Borders site. After all, why spend your time adding content to a site if you’re already invested in another one and you’re not even sure this new one’s here to stay?