Happily ever after is big business for mega department chain Belk. "Revamping a bridal registry that tracks more than 50,000 registered brides is not a simple endeavor. Every day, we run more than a hundred concurrent bridal sessions. Each registry can include any of the 186,000 products currently held in the Belk inventory database. In a given week we may drop an extra 1,000 to 1,500 products on to the bridal registry site. To manage this well we neeeded a grat software solution." Jay Carothers, Belk's President, eCommerce.

Blue Martini marries Brick-and-mortar with the web

When a 156-store department store chain with 186,000 products to track and a 112 year history of personalized service goes on-line, their legacy systems come with them.

The Belk vision was that the bride-to-be would waltz into a store, pick up a wireless pointing device called a scanner, point that scanner at gift she wanted to add to her registry and the information about that product would magically be added to her registry on the Web and at in-store kiosks in all Belk stores immediately. Here's the story of how Blue Martini updated Belk's bridal registry and Web store for the new millennium while seamlessly integrating with legacy mainframe and an aged wireless communications systems.

This is one of many case studies written for Blue Martini Software by Joe Devlin and Emily Berk of Armadillo Assoc.