Borders
Group, the second largest book seller in
the U.S., will take back its e-commerce
site and consumer fulfillment operations
at the start of 2008 from Amazon.com, which
Borders has used as its outsource provider
for both for a number of years.
In
an interview in the Wall Street Journal,
Borders CEO George Jones notes that when
the company first began its e-commerce initiative,
the options were limited.
At
the time, “There weren’t the
options for third-party fulfillment that
there are today,” Jones said.
The
volumes weren’t yet there to do it
in-house either: “You had to build
a massive overhead that didn’t make
any sense in terms of the volume of the
business.”
As
fulfillment options and consumer volumes
have changed, so has Borders' strategy.
This is especially true given the uncertainty
about who really “owns” the
customer when a company outsources both
its web site and fulfillment to a third
party, especially one that is also a competitor.
“When
someone goes to borders.com and winds up
at Amazon, Amazon gets the customer and
forms the relationship with the customer,”
Jones added. |