At the start of this summer Borders revealed a new eCommerce portal, designed to help it’s flagging book and media selling business catch up to eCommerce giants like Amazon.com. The project has been sucessful, but that’s mostly because what borders has created is far more than just a website. They’ve overhauled their IT systems to fit in with every part of their business from marketing, to ordering, to sales.

The full story is available here (part 1, part 2) in a quite long two part article on cio.com. The article is focused primarily on the site itself but quotes throughout point to how this solution that borders has implemented really goes beyond just real-estate on the web.

Marketing Integration

“Like the majority of online retailers, Borders is analyzing customer satisfaction scoring data and Web analytics, in its case, using the Omniture application suite. ‘There’s a million things we can do with that,” Ertell says, “doing ad-hoc analysis on what’s working and what’s not.’”

Back System Integration

“…all had to be integrated with Borders’ existing back-office systems and some that connect to external partners