The Official Fluid Blog

Many of the multi-channel merchants we work with have invested in beautiful photography that shows a range of products in highly branded settings. Many of these photos are shot primarily for print catalogs and, up to now, retailers haven’t been able to put these assets to affective use on the web.

In some cases, catalogers have uploaded versions of their print catalog to the web. While there are legitimate reasons to do this, Fluid’s customers have generally found results from these efforts disappointing. Conversion rates are low, as you would expect from directly translating a print layout to the web. Even with the fancy page flipping affect many of them add .

In other instances retailers have simply taken the existing photo assets and overlaid merchandising text in Photoshop. While this serves the purpose, this text frequently looks cluttered and may significantly lessen the brand impact of the photo. These photos were taken to create an emotional connection between the shopper and a brand or product. Reading text overlays certainly lessens the visual impact and can also distract from the emotional connection of envisioning yourself in the scene.
Other retailers have used these assets as the basis for a richer shopping experience, creating tooltips that appear on mouse over. This is a great use of interactive technology but up to now has been resource intensive to produce. The manual production required to update a banner has required a designer to create the visual and an engineer to wire up the custom Flash or AJAX technology. By the time the banner is integrated into the site it could be a week or more later.

The Fluid Retail team has recently released an enhancement to Fluid Experience that allows retailers to more efficiently use rich brand photography on their site. Using our authoring tools virtually any member of the production team can pull in existing photography, mask out and associate products and publish the assets to the site without need of any technical skills. The whole process can be completed in a matter of minutes.

I’ve embedded an example of the type of interactivity that is possible with Fluid Experience below. Note that shoppers are able to learn about all the products shown, without leaving the photography that has engaged them. Combined with a quick shop window and mini-cart, this type of interactivity encourages the purchase of multiple products.

It is also worth noting that this merchandising component is embedded using Fluid Social’s content syndication capabilities, that allow anyone to take your site content to iGoogle, blogs, MySpace or Facebook.

As I said earlier, the real magic behind the Fluid technology is the authoring tool that eliminates the need to have Flash developers or IT involved in publishing new assets to the site. If you are looking for better ways to engage shoppers with rich product photography you should contact us to learn more.

Fluid is growing… we’re growing our expertise, we’re growing our client base, and we’re growing our team. We’ve got a number of positions available right now, but the one I’d like to highlight is our Lead Engineer position. At Fluid, the Lead Engineer really gets a chance to stand out, and be not only a technical leader, but a thought leader. We love to hear new ideas and find new ways to blow the minds of our clients.

This is a chance to really build your career working with the cutting edge of technology on projects for top shelf clients. Lead Engineer isn’t just a name we throw around, our leads really are at the forefront of the engineering team. They contribute at every phase of development from concept to launch, leading their team to the successful completion of each project and rave customer reviews.

So if you’ve got a talent for handling responsibility, working with others, and setting technical direction, even if you haven’t been a lead before, we want to hear from you! We’ve got a quick questionnaire to get the interviewing started right off the bat, so hop onto the link below and take the first step into a Dilbert-free life.

One other thing, if you’re not interested yourself but know someone who might be, refer them and get five grand if they get hired. That wasn’t a typo, it’ll be the easiest money you ever made.

Get Started Here: http://jobs.accolo.com/14202

Not too long ago I panned American Airlines for trying to cover their business’ shortcomings by charging for every checked bag. In the spirit of Ying and Yang and balance in the universe I wanted to write about an equally great ecommerce experience I had with Zappos.com.

I ordered two pairs of shoes from their site. First, they upgraded the shipping on my order for free. That was nice. Not terribly exciting but a nice thing.

More impressively, they took what could have been a negative experience and turned it into a positive. One pair of shoes I ordered turned out to, “…not pass our quality inspection and we do not have a replacement available in stock in the size and color you requested.” This was very disappointing and could have reflected badly on their brand, making me less likely to shop there in the future.

But as I kept reading I was amazed. Not only did they include a link to another retailer that had the product in stock (JC Penny in this case) but they included a link that took me directly to the product on their site! Tremendous!They knew what I wanted, that they could not help me, so they provided me a valuable service.
Not only did it turn my perception of the Zappos.com brand more positive, it virtually guaranteed that I would start there the next time I shop for dress shoes.

Turns out RBKCustom.com has a loyal customer in comedian Seth Rogen. He’s got several pairs of custom Reebok’s and is a big fan of the text personalization feature. As hilariously described in a recent appearance on Conan O’ Brien he has a particular knack for getting creative with the offensive language filter. When Fluid built the site we spent a lot of time on realtime, true-to-life visualization of the sneaker personalization to ensure end-users see exactly what they are getting as they design their shoes. We also spent a lot of time brainstorming the dirty words list. Kudos to Mr. Rogen for sneaking a few by!

You can see the Conan bit here:

http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien/video/episodes.shtml

Choose the August 7th episode and then jump to 24:50.
You can also read about it in a few places:

Extract:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/07/seth_rogen_unlikely_spokesman.html

Full quote appears in context on page 2 here:
http://www.elle.com/featurefullstory/14098/seth-rogen-movies-gossip-articles-pineapple-express.html