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.
At Fluid we are constantly tuning our work to deliver the richest experiences without sacrificing performance and download times. To that end, one of our lead engineers, Cody Lindley, put together a great resource on the page weights for the leading ecommerce pages. I wanted to share it here, for everyone’s benefit. (the pages highlighted in yellow are Fluid customers, though in some cases the pages measured were not built by us)
As consumers tuck away their wallets and retailers feel the budget squeeze (despite the fact that online sales continue to rise) Fluid has put together a set of consulting offerings designed to deliver tangible and immediate ROI on a limited budget.
These packages range from $25,000 – $45,000 and are designed to let our clients tap into our expertise in ecommerce customer experience without breaking the bank.
The four initial offerings include:
We are excited to offer solutions that are specifically designed to meet the needs of the current challenging environment. Thus far, we have had a strong response from retailers looking to use these packages to learn from this year’s holiday season and implement a more effective site in early 2009.
Yesterday Fluid announced Fluid Lite, which we believe is a significant step forward in the capabilities small and mid-sized ecommerce retailers are able to offer on their site. In short, this release means retailers that cannot afford or do not need the full interactive shopping capabilities of Fluid Experience can offer simple zoom, rotation/multiple views and color change on their site at an appropriate price point.
Initially we have launched Fluid Lite for the Yahoo! Stores platform through our partner Fast Pivot (www.fastpivotsoftware.com). For $200/month users can add the same rich zoom functionality that has been proven to increase conversion by 15-50%. Better, this is offered from a self-service site with virtually no need for implementation services (though the folks at Fast Pivot will do a great job helping you out, if you’d like). Even better, the integration with the Yahoo product catalog is built in, so you don’t have to do redundant data entry in Fluid Lite. There is almost no additional work.
The results from the first customer, Automoblox, have been tremendous. They have moved from a site with small, static images to utilize large, interactive images that really showcase their unique product. And ultimately, shopping is about engaging people with your products. We’ll share increase in conversion data with you once we’ve had enough traffic.
One of the most important aspects of the Fluid Lite offering is the deep integration with the ecommerce platform users get out of the box. The Yahoo Stores integration can automatically import product data so you don’t have any manual work. As we complete other integrations, Fluid will be working with partners to roll out Fluid Lite self-service solutions for other SMB ecommerce platforms, including Netsuite Commerce, Amazon Webstores and others. For customers that are already using those platforms we are able to help you now – it is simply the self-service piece and default integration we are working to put in place.
While we think Fluid Lite is an exciting alternative to overpriced imaging solutions on the market today, Fluid still offers Fluid Experience for customers that want to use interactive technology to increase conversion broadly across their site, from site arrival to conversion. Beyond the basic zoom and swatching solutions, Fluid Experience offers video, recently viewed items, suggestive selling and shoppable lifestyle photography.
Williams Sonoma recently released their Q2 results and they were eye opening. First, overall sales were down by 4.6%, which is obviously a source for concern. The trend is clear that overall retail spending is down broadly, with low cost retailers being the notable exception (Walmart’s sales were up 2%).
In the face of these trends there are a few things that stand out. First, same store sales were down an eye-opening 8.6% in May but an even greater amount – 14% – in July. Obviously this isn’t a number that will make anyone feel good. Nor is the trend positive.
On the bright side, at least from Fluid’s perspective, is that web sales were up by 11.7%. One can only hope this stark contrast between same store sales and online sales will finally drive home the point that the web is of growing importance to any retailer’s strategy and, in fact, is the biggest (and perhaps only) current opportunity for improvement.
I think this quote from Jack Hruska, executive VP at Bloomindales, illustrates the current situation best:
“Still, those retailers ‘who play up their strengths will emerge stronger when the economy comes back than those who retreat or scale back,’ Mr. Hruska added. ‘We’ve seen that time and time again.’”
Now is clearly no time to pull back from investment in the online channel.
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.
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.
At Fluid we believe (passionately) in the intermingling of merging of the brand and shopping experience. As a practical matter, this consists of blurring the line between content and commerce so shoppers are not forced to choose between one or the other, but instead have a great experience that (hopefully) leads to a transaction.
Quite aside from the realities of doing this in a seamless manner, there are often organizational issues at play (brand content is often owned by marketing and commerce is owned by either consumer direct or the ecommerce team). But we believe strongly that this convergence is not only good for retailers but is good for consumers, allowing them to navigate to their interests without being blocked by some artificial, vendor created, division.
Thus, the something I saw today really caught my attention.
I am probably not alone in viewing CNN as a content-focused company. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw an icon for a t-shirt next to the news story I was reading. See the screen grab below:
Certainly they couldn’t be featuring apparel on their site?!?! Time Warner is a media company!
Further investigation, as shown below, pretty clearly shows that selling t-shirts is exactly their intention.
Personally, I think this is a brilliant move. Quite aside from the trend toward embracing the ironic in apparel, it should be a wake up call to retailers everywhere: The companies that engage their shoppers, whether with content or product, will carry the day. The line between content providers and retailers is getting fuzzier every day. Given the current upheaval in the media world, if you don’t believe the fashion magazines you advertise in now will be selling your competitors’ goods in the relatively near future you are in for quite a rude awakening.
Of course you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you are a company that makes shoes, your business isn’t going to be based upon writing critiques of Sarah Jessica Parker’s latest pair of Manolo Blahnik’s over night. But it does encourage you seriously consider to how you can draw shoppers into your store, whether it be through rich interactivity or content, and engage them with your products.
Interesting times we work in…
At Fluid we’re thrilled that Reebok recently utilized our products as an important part of their site relaunch. Although we didn’t do the redesign (it was done by Carat/Molecular), the site shows off some of the great capabilities of our products including the ability to add our interactive technology directly into an all Flash site.
Perhaps more exciting than how the products were implemented into the design is the milestone this represents for us at Fluid. Having top tier agencies like Carat and Molecular utilizing our product technology is a symbol of the exciting growth we’ve seen from a well respected boutique agency to industry leaders in customer experience for online retail.
In developing our products we were confident technology providers such as ecommerce platforms and product search providers would be happy to partner with us. But we had serious concerns (and more than a few heated debates) whether other agencies would be comfortable implementing products whose genesis was largely out of a competitor. These concerns forced us to be incredibly disciplined in developing our products. In every instance we have created a product that is open, easy to implement and completely customizable by our customers and their agencies. And most importantly we wanted to build a product in the truest sense, where our customers and partner agencies can be completely self-sufficient, with no need to involve Fluid in the product implementation (unless our help was desired).
With the launch of Reebok.com, built by world leading agencies using Fluid’s products, we are entering a new era for our products. We welcome any agency to use our products to offer their clients a richer experience they can maintain without any Flash expertise. We expect this will help other agencies build the same sort of engaging experiences Fluid creates for its customers faster and more cost effectively. Contact us to learn how your agency can start using our products today.
Today American Airlines announced it would start charging passengers to check baggage.
While other company’s businesses are always complex and I try not to judge others, this strikes me as an extreme example of making a problem and making it worse. Traditional carriers like United and American are hemorrhaging money hand over fist while upstarts like Southwest, Jet Blue and Virgin America take market share from them. Their response? Start charging for things that used to be free (food, now bags) while instituting policies that make flying their airlines more unpleasant (crowded cabins just got worse, since everyone will try to carry everything on board). Seems like a recipe for driving customers screaming for the exits.At Fluid we take our responsibility for our customers’ satisfaction seriously and expect to deliver above expectations. It is our sincere hope that when customers are not happy with our delivery rather than charging them more to fix it we offer to increase our delivery to exceed our clients’ needs.
While it is just my opinion, the new policies airlines are instituting to try and squeeze every dime out of customers fly directly in the face of building a long term, successful customer relationship and business.