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.

Phase II - Gift Registry

Getting the Belk bridal registry up and running took a lot of work, mostly setting things up so that Blue Martini interfaced well with all of Belk's existing mission critical legacy applications. Now that that job is done, it is relatively easy for Belk to roll out new Blue Martini-driven web initiatives. No surprise then that Belk is hard at work on Phase II and III.

Phase two of Blue Martini's implementation of Belk just recently went live. In this phase, a variety of gift registries are added.

In this design, too, Belk emphasizes the centrality of the recipient of the gifts. Jay Carothers says, "With the gift registry, once again we use JSPs to define how the products are presented. In Blue Martini, in general, products are presented in folder form. If the user wants to look at a tent, he or she goes into folder that contains tents and the user sees a list of choices: outdoor, indoor whatever you sell. It's pretty much folder related. But, Belks' gift registries are organized differently in that each registry crosses folders. Instead of using folders, you use attributes to choose which products to display."

As with the bridal registries, users of Belk's gift registries can use Telxon scanners to identify the products to be added to their registries and update their gift lists in real time.