The Official Fluid Blog

As a company exclusively focused in online retail it is important for our employees to stay abreast of the latest developments in the industry. One problem we ran into was asking all our employees to subscribe to a variety of news sources. Some had RSS feeds, some news came via email and others you had to remember to visit their site regularly.

To ensure everyone at Fluid is on top of the latest ecommerce news an engineer created an aggregated news feed from a variety of the leading industry publications including Internet Retailer, Ecommerce Times, Clickz and Storefrontbacktalk.com. People at Fluid love it so much, we’re making it available to our customers, partners and anyone else that is interested. If there are other ecommerce news sources you access regularly please let us know and we’ll do our best to add them.

If you’d like to subscribe, please use the link below. If you run into issues let us know (some sources come through better than others) and we’ll try to clean them up.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/fluid_online_retail/ecommerce_industry_news

The Get Elastic blog had an interesting post last week on American Eagle’s (http://www.ae.com) incorporation of product merchandising elements within the drop down layer of its product catalog navigation (http://www.getelastic.com/merchandising-in-navigation). As the Elastic Path folks point out, it’s an effective technique for surfacing more product content without a click or a separate page view. It also obscures a lot of content and can impair overall site usability.

The technique inspired a lot of discussion at Fluid. Our typically crotchety CTO had this to say:

“I find it mildly interesting, but more of a distraction than a benefit. When I use navigation, I typically know where I want to go or quickly want to scan the options. It’s like going into a Macy’s and seeing a big ad for something random on the floor index when I’m looking for shoes. Really? Do you really need to distract me there as well? Maybe I’ll forget about buying the shoes altogether…”

While our Director of Information Design countered with his own take on balancing the needs of the retailer with those of the audience:

“I think that American Eagle’s implementation could be improved, and I agree that the size of the banner distracts, but I also think there is great value in merchandising like this. It’s definitely possible to do something less obtrusive and more integrated – a more natural extension of the navigation rather than an additional banner tacked on. There is a definite business potential here for popular online retailers who can get manufacturers to pay for placement like this, with the benefit of getting their product and brand recommendations in front of more eyes. Taking it one step further the retailers, in turn, could use this incremental revenue to keep shipping costs low or free.”

And finally, from a member of the design team:

“I agree that this is really interesting from a merchandising point of view but the UI is super busy and visually just taxing. It would be interesting to know if people are actually clicking through on any of these and how it’s effecting their overall site conversion rate.”

Personally, I agree – the UI is busy and ultimately distracting. But I am also not the target consumer. That would be teenage boys and girls, for whom I suspect visual clutter and informational density is a plus. Not to mention the “Hey, I wasn’t expecting that! Cool!” factor.

An interesting article ran in this month’s issue of Stores Magazine that talked about The North Face’s interactive marketing efforts, specifically the work they have done with Google Gadgets and Google Gadget Ads (more on that in a later post).

The spirit of what The North Face is doing is something a lot of brands are considering and is captured by the following quote from Kent Deverell, a founder of Fluid, “…in the last year and a half, with the rise of social networking, consumers are becoming content-creators themselves. The new paradigm is to get people involved and allow them to own the brand.” Scary stuff. But is there really an alternative?

Conversations about your brand are going to occur online, like it or not. Postive or negative. Isn’t it better to facilitate the conversation than sit idly by while it swirls around you? The North Face has been forward looking in many ways. By embracing the convergence of professional content, user generated content and product merchandising in their WWW and widget strategy they show they are continuing to engage brand advocates in new and interesting ways.

We look forward to more exciting ideas from Sarah Gallagher and her team!