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www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/trends/article.php/1451131
By James Maguire August 22, 2002 Company
As much as any retailer, BN combines its online and brick-and-mortar outlets into a single shopping experience. "We've recently rolled out a new bookmaster system, which is an in-store system that is linked to the Barnes and Noble.com order distribution and fulfillment system," says David Willen, BN's chief technology officer. If a customer in a Barnes and Noble store requests a book that's not in stock, that bookseller can access the online inventory and have the book delivered to the customer's home or to the store, depending on customer preference. And, further leveraging its position in both the online and offline world, customers can return online purchases at their local Barnes and Noble store. The Problem
The Solution
"I've always liked the Microsoft technologies," Willen says, "because they're based upon what I would refer to as small or 'granular' computer systems - the physical machines. So they're scaleable. You can add small granular boxes if you need capacity, or conversely you can reduce if you have more capacity than needed." "Fortunately," he says, "the Microsoft solution is built on a commodity-based Intel computer, and it's not that expensive to add a few more when you need capacity." This additional capacity has been needed as BN has expanded since its launch in 1997. In those early days the site was a distinct underdog with its competitor Amazon.com, which launched in 1995. Since then, however, BN has invested heavily in its technical infrastructure. One area that Willen has recently improved is BN's search engine. He found that the site's search tool needed to be more intelligent, and after dedicating an additional bank of servers to this function, he says it's more responsive. "We know the customers who visit the site basically fall into two categories: the very directed searchers who know the book or author they're looking for, and another class of customers who come to the site to browse for books," he says. To improve the search and browse function for this second group, BN developed a feature called BookBrowser. "It allows them to interactively explore the entire online catalog via categories," Willen says. The BookBrowser function creates a kind of hierarchical subject presentation, in which, for example, a reader interested in mystery novels set in 19th century Great Britain can more easily drill down from the overall fiction category. After the customer makes a purchase, BN's distribution and fulfillment system - also powered by Microsoft software - computes the best way to assemble that order. "We've got several distribution centers and at any time they might stock different items. So we often have to assemble a package for a customer that consists of items from more than one distribution center," Willen says. "And we've got a lot of program logic that we've put in that tries to optimize that process so that customers' expectations are met in terms of when we ship the packages." This system of linking multiple warehouses is particularly important since BN, like its chief competitors, offers free shipping to customers under certain conditions; in BN's case it's for orders of more than two items. Willen says this has been a particularly popular offer. Unlike one of its competitors, Buy.com, Willen says that BN does not use software to chart its competitors' prices. While he says that BN stays "very much aware" of the competitive offerings, they do not have systemic price tracking, or any automated process like that. But BN does, like all large online retailers, use its e-commerce software to collect data about aggregate user behavior. "So, for example, we want to know that when a large percentage of customers are on a particular page of the site, they then go to a different [specific] page of the site," Willen says. With this knowledge, the site engineers work to improve that path's navigation. He says that the Microsoft software "provides a good collection of telemetry about the way the site is used." As for future directions, says Willen, "One of the things we're focusing on is improving the experience for the customer," including the site's improved search function and other site tools. "One of the interesting things about running an Internet storefront is that it really is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, which presents challenges that conventional stores don't have. And I think that's what makes it really exciting to run an Internet site." |
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