At REI, a cooperative with 2 million members, many products for sports such as climbing, mountain biking and skiing are technical. Customers not only want to research before they buy, they want to try before they buy. To that end, REI views the website both as a sales channel and a driver to stores. Free in-store pickup for online orders is a strategy specifically designed to get people into the stores.

And to make that strategy as cost-efficient as possible, the company uses the same trucks that restock its stores to fulfill online orders slated for in-store pickup. To make this work, REI had to integrate order information from the website and replenishment orders from stores at its distribution warehouse in Washington state. REI.com uses IBM’s Websphere e-business platform that runs on an RS/600 with an Oracle database that interfaces to an order-processing system. The AS/400-based order-processing system is used throughout REI, including the store replenishment process.

In and of itself, integrating the two types of order information wasn’t complex, says Brad Brown, REI’s vice president of information services. What was difficult, however, was coordinating fulfillment of both online and replenishment orders because "orders placed on the Web [by customers] are nothing like replenishment orders that stores place," he says. Online orders are picked from the warehouse at the time of the order and then put in a queue until the appropriate truck is loaded, whereas store orders are picked by an automated replenishment system that typically picks orders at one time based on either a weekly or biweekly replenishment schedule.

To make in-store pickup a reality, Brown’s group wrote a "promise algorithm" that informs customers of a delivery date when they place an online order. Timing can get tricky when orders are placed the day before a truck is scheduled to depart the warehouse with a store-replenishment delivery. For example, if an online order is placed on a Monday night and a truck is scheduled to depart Tuesday morning, the system promises the customer a pickup date of a week later, as if the order would be placed on the following week’s truck. However, REI will shoot for fulfilling the order that night; if it can do it, REI (and, ultimately, the customer) is happy because the order arrives sooner than was promised.

REI has also expanded its multichannel philosophy to include services. In February, the company launched an integrated gift registry that allows people to set up gift lists and enables Aunt Tillie, for example, to purchase requested items in any retail channel. The registry also allows consumers to post messages to other site visitors, seeking information or specific, hard-to-find products. Customers can create a gift registry in one of two ways: They can use a kiosk or scan products with a handheld device. They also have the option of registering for gifts by calling customer service or going through REI.com. Once a registry is set up, REI sends e-mails to a designated list of recipients, complete with a link to a personalized registry page. According to Brown, the registry is a way to expand sales among consumers who don’t traditionally shop at REI.