Laying it online: how the top private companies in the state are opening up commerce on the Internet.

• Author: Lacour, Greg

Jessica Kirk emerges from SouthPark mall in Charlotte on a rainy Saturday in August with a plastic bag of loungewear from Belk in her hand. Kirk, 33, is expecting her first child. She still gets around OK, but seven months pregnant is seven months pregnant.

She has shopped at Belk since she was a teenager. She lives nearby and decided to pop in after picking up items from other stores in the mall. She can always find a bargain at Belk. Of course, she could have stayed home and clicked over to Belk.com, lynchpin of the Charlotte-based department-store chain's multimillion-dollar expansion into e-commerce. But she doesn't care for it. Fact is, she hasn't visited the site in awhile. "I don't shop for clothes on Belk's website. I don't know why--I just find it difficult to navigate for some reason. And I'm a huge online shopper. I shop Nordstrom all the time online. The design is really clean, it's easy to navigate, has lots of pictures. With Belk, I don't know--it just doesn't capture your attention." The company is working on it. From the dawn of e-commerce in the early 1990s until 2010, Belk Inc. lagged in marketing itself and selling its wares online. Even after it launched a website that offered some of its collections in September 2008, they were minimal compared with national competitors' such as Cincinnati-based Macy's Inc. and Seattle-based Nordstrom Inc. (Before then, Belk.com had been for bridal registries.) Graphics were primitive, product information scant. The site was slow and crashed often. "When I came on board, we didn't even have a Facebook fan page," says Ivy Chin, the senior vice president Belk hired in late 2009 to oversee e-commerce and digital sales. "They realized they were behind and needed some help."

Since her arrival, the nation's largest privately owned department-store chain has beefed up and streamlined its website and created a social-media team to keep its name bouncing around Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and otaer social networks. Online sales have skyrocketed from $20 million in 2009 to $133 million in 2012. They're projected to reach $230 million this year, on their way to an ultimate goal of 10% of total sales, which were just short of $4 billion in 2012.

So its online expansion has succeeded, helping Belk retain title as the state's largest private company, according to Grant Thornton LLP's North Carolina 100, an annual ranking of closely held Tar Heel companies based on previous-year revenue. (It's claimed the top spot every year since 2010, the first time it participated in the voluntary survey.) Company officials emphasize that e-commerce growth doesn't herald a cutback of traditional stores, many of which are centerpieces of small-town retail in the South.

Still, it's a juggling act, and Belk is trying to find its way in a market that seems to change by the hour. It's a challenge each company on the list faces. "A private company's online strategy depends on where they see...