And online customers, it should be noted, are notorious for their impatience with slow sites that lack an intuitive design and personalized attention. "Consumers are increasingly seeking online experiences that are relevant, engaging and personal," writes Forrester Research analyst Kerry Bodine in a June 2008 report. "That's why companies need to design websites that are not only useful (offer value) and usable (provide easy access to value) but also desirable (appeal to emotions)."

Ertell says Borders employed several methods to gauge what their customers wanted in a site. "We spent a lot of time doing customer research, and we started out just actually talking to customers," he says. "What they liked, and what they didn't."

A beta site that lacked the e-commerce functionality but had lots of other elements went live in September 2007. "The whole point was to get it up and get as much feedback as we could on that," he says. Borders also partnered with social networking site Gather.com to assemble even more feedback.

The early version of the Magic Shelf went live on the beta site. Ertell says that there was some "internal discussion" about whether the Magic Shelf idea was good or not. "So we just put it up and said: Let the customers tell us if it is," he says. "And what we found was that they loved the idea, but they didn't necessary love the execution of that original one. There were some things navigationally that they didn't like."

The end result of all that testing, however, was that, according to Borders feedback, the Magic Shelf has been a "big, big hit," Ertell says, though he declines to provide specific metrics.

Why Go to a Bookstore?

Borders was aware that to truly cement the new site-to-store connection, the in-store search kiosks needed to be connected to the Web. So Borders created a version of Borders.com that would work on the kiosks. As of early July, Ertell says those are currently being rolled out to Borders' 1,100 stores.

The in-store kiosks connected to the Web are key, says Kevin Sterneckert, a retail research director at AMR Research, mainly because it's really hard to find an associate who's as knowledgeable as what's offered online. Sterneckert says that the last time he was in a Borders physical store, he wondered why anyone actually went to bookstores any more.

"Where do I start to find a book? Where do I look for my favorite authors? Where will I start? I didn't know," Sterneckert recalls thinking. "I found myself wanting to go back to the Web so that I could locate what I wanted. I think the tie-in that Borders is trying to do with the Web and in-store experience is really critical."

Says Ertell: "The idea is to bring all those strengths together, to not only let people place orders in the stores via those and thus augment our store inventory by more than 10 times, but also allow people to create a 'wish list' at home and access it at the store." Scraps of paper that people put in their wallets or pocketbooks will, hopefully, be a thing of the past, he adds.

Site-to-store and store-to-site ordering and pickup or delivery is a critical customer component for all retailers these days. At Borders, the new store-to-site kiosk capability will help to further the brick and mortar and online bind. "If the customer goes into a store looking for something obscure that we don't carry, they've got the ability, right there in the store, to satisfy their need and have it shipped right to the home or to the store," Harwood says.

AMR's Sterneckert is bullish on this service offering. "I think the connection between online and in-store presence is really what the customer is looking for and that will pay dividends for Borders," he says. "You can't go to other bookstores and have a rich experience, like what you can get online. This can be a competitive advantage for them."

In Part 2: As the struggling retailer makes a massive effort to win e-commerce success, can it capitalize on any late-mover advantages? Borders IT and business execs take CIO.com inside the technology effort, the early results and the competitive challenge that you can call nothing but Amazonian. See "Inside the E-Commerce Strategy That Could Save Borders, Part 2."