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 III - Apparel

During the third phase of Belk's relationship with Blue Martini, an apparel website will be added.

"This will be a wardrobing type of deal where we put together tops and bottoms, change the colors out, etc. The way it will work is, if the user buys this pair of pants, the system will suggest matching tops, and provide a list of color options. We will have an image of the one color and then you click on the color wheel and will recolor the tops. This capability comes from one of Blue Martini's partners."

According to Colby Sheridan, "Adding the apparel into the site makes it a relatively large launch, but that's really because of the amount of content being added."

"To get the apparel into the site we added just two additional templates. Templates are just HTML files with a little Java interspersed in them. But the big change was content. We needed the product details from the business side. That's all that's necessary to make a major line extension launch like apparel. We just tapped into a different part of the database."