Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Presumably, the E-Commerce team TJX assembled a year ago has already concluded that the U.K. site can’t simply be scaled up for use in the U.S. That means TJX is looking at a very Target-like possibility: the need to build a world-class E-tail site from the ground up.

Fortunately, there’s no Target-like deadline (remember, Target knew exactly when its agreement with Amazon would run out), so TJX’s unwillingness to set a date—or even a year—for the new site to go live makes sense. The number and size of schedule slips are directly proportional to how public the go-live date is.

But no matter how much time it has, how could TJX create that new E-Commerce site? It could build from scratch and take its Target-style lumps. That’s the option Meyrowitz is clearly trying to avoid.

It could hire the job out to Amazon and really set itself up to become the next Target.

It could buy another retailer’s E-tail site (or just buy another retailer) and rebrand the site for TJX. But that’s like buying a used car—a second-hand site will have lots of limitations and minor problems, the unavoidable result of having been patched and remodeled over years of use.

Or TJX could make use of its biggest E-Commerce advantage: the fact that its U.K. site is already working, even if it won’t scale up. TJX could build the new site as if it were a replacement for the U.K. site, but on steroids. Once it was finished, the chain could keep the existing TK Maxx site running and channel only some of the traffic to the new site. That wouldn’t be simple—both sites would have to talk to the same transaction backend—but it would mean some of the more obvious problems could be handled in a low-volume mode.

(The new site might even be built in the U.S. with transactions handled trans-Atlantically, though that could run afoul of tighter U.K. privacy requirements.)

With the existing site always available as a fallback, there wouldn’t have to be a sudden flip of the switch to go live. And when the new site is finally ready to completely replace the current site, it will also be ready to return to the U.S.—not quite stress-tested at full U.S. E-Commerce loads, but with many more glitches already worked out.

Would that work? That depends on lots of contingencies that nobody outside TJX knows. And along with technical issues, this is a company that’s been burned by E-Commerce before and is still smarting from a massive payment-card security breach. Meyrowitz, who first worked for TJ Maxx in 1983, rejoined the company as president on the same day the original E-tail site was shelved in 2005, and was promoted to CEO just days after the Gonzalez breach was announced in 2007. That, as much as Target’s failure, has to be on her mind.

But if TJX wants to get into fill-scale U.S. E-Commerce with as little risk as possible, building in the U.K. first might be the way to do it.