In many ways, Sears approached setting up the infrastructure for buy online, pick up and return in store, which went live December 2001, in much the same way as Circuit City. Rather than buy new technology, Sears looked to leverage its legacy systems. Like Circuit City, Sears also had an existing area in its stores reserved for merchandise pickup. The two retailers even used the same Broadvision e-commerce and content management systems.

But Sears faced its own unique challenge: transforming an inventory system that was updated on a nightly basis to a real-time, Web-enabled system.

The foundation for Sears’s buy online, pick up in store capability is a UDB database that holds real-time inventory information. To connect its store POS system and e-commerce system with the UDB database, Sears uses IBM’s MQ Series middleware and XML. Those technologies function as a transport mechanism that moves data from the POS and e-commerce systems to the inventory systems. To make the POS, e-commerce and real-time inventory systems communicate with each other, Sears wrote one program that’s used by both the cash registers and the Web to invoke a command, such as "check a local store’s inventory." All three systems run and understand this program.

"For the buy online, pick up in store, we had to enable stores to receive sale transaction data from other locations, i.e. the Web, and be able to finish it in their systems," says Noreen Iles, Sears vice president of customer interaction systems.

To that end, Sears wrote an application that made a Web-generated transaction look identical to a store transaction. When a person searches Sears’s website for a Craftsman drill and decides to check if her local store carries it, Sears’s Web servers determine what kind of transaction has just been submitted?an inventory look up, a sale, a link to another page?and where the transaction needs to be sent. In this case, it gets sent to the real-time database. If the drill is available at the customer’s local store and she arranges to pick it up that day, the server sends the transaction to the store, indicating that the drill needs to be reserved.

It was crucial for Sears to get this integration right. It had to make sure that when a product was purchased online, the sale got logged in to its real-time inventory system and that the inventory level in the system went down accordingly.

Once Sears was sure it had all the right hooks in all the right systems, the company found it needed to make some adjustments on the front end.