On the 10th of this month, at a historic mansion in Doylestown, Pa., William Dauber and Kimberly Shea will do what 2.4 million people do every year in the United States?get married. But well before that hallowed moment, their engagement has already transformed them into something else: the dream target for practically every retailer in the country. n The American bridal industry is estimated to have revenues of between $30 billion and $50 billion, with the average twentysomething couple spending $28,000 on the event itself. The gift registry part of the industry?where the lucky couple lists what presents their guests are expected to buy for them?is estimated to be about $17 billion. Take all those marriage-minded twentysomethings and all that shopping, and the only next logical step was for the bridal space to go online. And it’s not only the wedding space that has taken the registry idea online?lots of other gift and special occasion retailers are there too.

From an IT point of view, any gift registry is a relatively complex set of database and supply chain interactions. The database has to present a secure environment to the person who’s registering. That information is then displayed to those who are buying the gifts. As a specific gift is selected, it is removed from the list before anyone else orders the same thing. Meanwhile, the database has to interact with the company’s inventory lists, showing what’s in stock and, in the best of all possible worlds, alerting buyers and registrants when things are on back-order.

For the bridal space, timing is an especially big deal. It’s usually a narrow window between wedding announcement and wedding date, and the what’s-still-available list has to be up-to-date and match between the online and the old-line stores. That narrow window is probably what attracts today’s instant-gratification generation: 50 percent of engaged couples have either planned or already registered for their wedding gifts online, according to an April 2000 study by The NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based market research company.

Web portals such as ModernBride.com, Theknot.com, WeddingChannel.com and WeddingNetwork.com let couples do everything from register online to find a ring, gown, tux or honeymoon spot. The newly emergent online portion of the gift registry business already accounts for $1.7 billion, estimates Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. Brick-and-mortar stores are cozying up to grooms with in-store scanner guns for zapping gifts into registries (see "Happiness Is a Warm Laser Gun," Page 117) as smart retailers are taking advantage of new technologies to make a lucrative sector even more profitable.