Borders

Also known as Borders Group, Borders Books and Music

Cause of death

Killed by a successor

with killed by cost as a contributing factor

It outsourced its own website to Amazon in 2001 and never got the customers back.

Borders was the bookshop that took the category seriously, with deep stock and staff who had read things. Its fatal decision came early: rather than build online, it handed its e-commerce operation to Amazon for most of a decade, training its own customers to buy books somewhere else. It also bet heavily on CDs and DVDs as those collapsed. Liquidation finished in September 2011, and Barnes & Noble inherited the survivors.