Interactivity is even more important. A catalog, printed months in advance, doesn't allow a way to play up a product that's started to sell especially well. "It's difficult to react to market conditions," says David Towers, director of customer experience for the New York retailer. But online content, he notes, has the potential to be changed daily or even hourly.

J. Crew's first site was a catalog adjunct intended mainly to gather information on customer needs. But in 1997 and 1998, the company realized the Web's ability to generate sales, so it invested in Web infrastructure. Turns out the company was right: Its fiscal 2000 Internet revenue was $107 million, up from $65 million in the previous year.

The E-commerce site has evolved dramatically. Personalization, which is in the testing stage, is the most recent step. For instance, the retailer ran a sweater sale early this year; registered users in the North were shown heavy wool, while those in the South saw lightweight cotton.

Personalization is expected to be J. Crew's biggest focus and will depend on the successful deployment of version 5.0 of ATG Dynamo, J. Crew's application server. "It'll stimulate sales," says J. Crew CIO Paul Fusco. "It keeps customers on the site longer and helps them enjoy the experience."

J. Crew is looking at new technology for customer interaction--chat and voice over IP--but it has reservations. Chat, for example, takes extensive personnel to react quickly enough to inquiries, and it intimidates customers. "We don't want customers to do things that are unnatural, unwieldy," Towers says, "and we need to make sure we can handle something at high service levels. There's no use doing chat if you can't handle the traffic."

Right now, customers want to communicate primarily by telephone and E-mail. J. Crew chose Kana Communications Inc. for its E-mail-response management; Kana provides the automation to help service reps respond quickly while also tailoring their correspondence to the customers.

J. Crew sees E-mail emerging as a powerful channel for inbound and outbound messages. "It's not just an offshoot to the Internet anymore," Towers says. The company uses FloNetwork Inc. for outbound E-mail marketing, allowing for a dialog between retailer and consumer as shoppers respond to personalized marketing messages.

The line between J. Crew's catalog and Internet businesses is nearly invisible. In fact, all of J. Crew's direct retail customers are in the same database. The one area that's posing integration obstacles is the retail-store business.

Consumers shop the retail stores differently from direct channels: They browse instead of looking for certain items--and they don't leave their names, so it's hard to tell which of them are also catalog and Web shoppers. J. Crew aims to overcome the integration issues by deploying SAP's enterprise resource planning package companywide, believing that a single platform will make it easier to tie together customer records and orders from various channels. As for how to gather information from store shoppers, J. Crew is evaluating several options, including frequent-shopper cards.

Eddie Bauer
Maybe it's Eddie Bauer's proximity to Bill Gates and the rest of the Seattle high-tech scene, but the 80-year-old cataloger has taken the move to the Internet in stride. The Redmond, Wash., company won't break out its E-commerce numbers from the rest of the Spiegel group, but Spiegel's E-commerce sales grew 200% last year, to $227 million, from $76 million in 1999. And Eddie Bauer accounts for more than half of Spiegel's overall sales.

Eddie Bauer treats E-commerce as more than an extension of its business. "We want to transcend the catalog experience," says divisional VP McKenzie. The interactive media group is adding more product detail and experimenting with Web-only features; My Account keeps track of gifts, and reminds customers of relatives' birthdays.

Another feature helps customers buy ensembles. Eddie Bauer's customers can be divided into two groups: those who like to select clothing piece by piece, and those who prefer to buy everything at once. Instant Outfit puts together coordinating shirts, pants, and shoes, then lets the customer buy them all with the click of a button.

Eddie Bauer tries to maintain the same levels of customer service for its Web site and for its catalog business.

E-mail, for example, is treated like a phone call and is typically answered within minutes. Technology helps; Eddie Bauer uses ServiceSoft Inc.'s eService product to provide Web customer service and E-mail-response management. But there's more. "It's also because we're used to staffing a call center. It's a pretty easy translation," says Susan Knight, division VP of customer care for Eddie Bauer's direct division.

That's an approach Eddie Bauer frequently takes--building on its heritage to offer better E-commerce. It uses its catalog expertise to fulfill orders and provide customer service, and its retail presence of more than 550 stores--compared with J. Crew's 150 and Lands' End's 18--to let shoppers return online orders. The retailer is working on building tighter links between its channels; although all orders currently go through a single system, customer purchase and service records are in different systems. The company is considering in-store kiosks to gather customer information and may integrate all its customer .information

Eddie Bauer, like its counterparts, hesitates to use technology just because it's there. The company supports chat, but doesn't push it because it sees little demand. It's not deploying voice over IP, also for lack of demand. It's doing some basic personalization, but doesn't believe that extensive customer-database segmentation will be worth the investment.

"We're frugal in spending. We'll continue to use [an existing system] even if it's patched together on the back end," Knight says. "What will drive us to change that is when we can't provide the kind of service the customer expects."