The Official Fluid Blog

Fluid Social takes a fresh look at defining what social shopping is. It is the first product to focus on getting consumers the opinions that matter most – those of their friends and family – at the point they matter most – on your ecommerce site. The product’s genesis is from insights gained through years spent designing leading-edge ecommerce experiences on behalf of our clients. It has been in development for years.

We’ve written a whitepaper to articulate why this is such an important topic and how retailers can leverage existing friendships and social networks to improve the shopping experience, increase engagement and sell more. If you’d like to read the whitepaper please visit the Fluid website. If you need to read more about Fluid Social we can help you with that, too.

In this article from early 2008 Nick O’Neill predicts the existing social networks like Facebook with much larger audiences will overtake the shopping-focused sites like Kaboodle, Stylehive and This Next. We couldn’t agree more – we think the opinions of your existing friends will be more important to driving transactions than those of online “shopping friends.”

Customer and shopper response to date have told us that Nick was right. People are thrilled to finally have a way to get the opinions of their “real” friends directly embedded in the shopping experience. Want to see how? Checkout the latest on JanSport.com.

Some of you may have seen the recent articles published about the latest release of Fluid Social on AdAge and Techcrunch. We’re flattered by the coverage but even more excited by the response we are getting from customers and prospective customers.

We’re excited to point you to a new and improved version of our Friend-Based Merchandising on the JanSport site. The new release not only allows shoppers to see their Facebook friends’ comments on products on the shopping site but it also allows users to start their product exploration from within the JanSport site by clicking on the “My Friends Like” tab. It also pulls comments from friends to feature them more prominently on the site. It also posts to your news feed when you comment on a product or ask a question and features a Facebook application that allows you to zoom in and see a product in multiple colors.

We’re excited about the new release but can’t wait to hear your thoughts. Let us know what you think.

At Fluid we’ve delivered some interesting work in the past: Timberland’s Build Your Own Boot Studio (BYOB) was a breakthrough in product configuration, offering instant color change and the first rotation of a custom product. Reebok built upon this by allowing two axes of rotation as well as allowing shoppers to configure a product on a lifestyle photograph. The recent launch of the new Vans configurator, is one of the most exciting client launches during my time at Fluid.

The Vans work builds on many of our learnings of the past years:

• Designing a custom product is stressful. One of the biggest impediments to custom product sales has been the inability to get immediate validation on a design in real time. In the Vans configurator a shopper can send a link to a friend via instant messenger (or email). When the user clicks the link they’ll be brought into a collaborative shopping session where they can share design ideas and give feedback in real time. We believe this will not only increase sales but bring new shoppers to the Vans site.
• Product configuration is an iterative undertaking. We’re providing users a simple “Scratchpad” where they can save their designs in progress for easy reference without logging in. With the scratchpad users can save a design with a single click and return to a previous design just as quickly.
• All of this functionality is part of the Fluid Retail product suite, utilizing both Fluid Configure and Fluid Social. This means we’ll be able to deploy the technology faster and more cost effectively for future customers looking to create similar collaborative shopping experiences.

We couldn’t be more excited to share this client work with you…keep your eyes peeled for future deployments of Fluid Social collaborative shopping deployed in support of collaborative shopping for traditional, mainline products.

When we discuss Fluid Social, particularly for Facebook, we often get the question of whether a particular brand’s shoppers are actually on Facebook. That question is getting easier and easier to answer as there is overwhelming evidence that soon EVERYONE will be using Facebook regularly. A latest bit of research just showed up on CNN.com.

A key aspect of Fluid’s user-centric design approach is to engage in usability research early on in the design process. One key element of our approach is to administer usability tests using interactive low-fidelity prototypes. Throughout the years, Fluid has developed a unique technique of developing richly interactive prototypes by adding HTML, CSS and JavaScript within Adobe Fireworks to create click through prototypes that are easy to use, manage and update.

Recently, Adobe asked Fluid to share our approach of rapid prototyping with the Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Dreamweaver developer’s community and we were both honored and excited to do so.

Our in depth article, “Rapid interactive prototyping with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using Fireworks and Dreamweaver CS4″, can be found on Adobe’s website here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/rapid_interactive_prototyping.html