Borders tests bookselling site

Borders is beta testing its new bookselling site here.

It's a nice-looking site. But of course the fancy features don't help shoppers much. Here's a good, detailed review.

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.

The new Borders site won't support e-commerce transactions until January. But the company claims the site is already driving $2 million of transactions into its brick-and-mortar stores every week. That's pretty hard to believe, if you ask me. The site got less than 1.75 million visitors last month. To generate $2 million in weekly sales, one of every two people who visited the site had to schlep into a Borders and spend about $10. If they can prove that really happened, I'll eat a moldy Readers Digest condensed book for breakfast tomorrow.

For the past five years, Borders.com has been a branded front end for Amazon. Now that they're striking out on their own, will Borders develop their own third-party selling platform? Time will tell.