The Official Fluid Blog

We are pleased to announce an exciting addition to the Fluid team. Amy Lanigan has recently joined Fluid as Director of Client Strategy after previously serving as Assistant Director of Strategy at AKQA. While at AKQA Amy worked with high profile clients such as Target, Gap and Charles Schwab.

We’ve brought Amy on because gone are the days where retailers can rigidly control virtually every aspect of their online presence and shopping experience. Blogs and customer reviews mean consumers have a voice in the conversation. Content is increasingly portable and flexible. Conversion funnels begin before consumers get to your site and social networks allow consumers unprecedented influence over what friends and strangers are buying online and in stores. This complex landscape requires shopping and brand experiences that are thoughtful, flexible and strategic.

It is Amy’s job to help our clients plot a path through this evolving landscape, particularly in social media, and to make sure everything Fluid deploys is on target from both a quantitative business and brand perspective.

Welcome, Amy.

New research from Mintel and publicized by eMarketer further reinforces the importance of friends and family members in buying process. This is exactly the type of authentic peer-to-peer feedback, both asynchronous sharing through Facebook and real time collaborative shopping, we enable with Fluid Social.

A nice piece by Jennifer Saranow Schultz ran in the Wall Street Journal this morning describing how retailers are increasingly leveraging a shoppers’ social network to move people through the conversion funnel. In it Jennifer does a great job of capturing the key aspects of the Fluid Social product.

The data we’ve been collecting from our customer installations is proving that comments from friends are the most effective way to drive immediate increases in engagement and conversion.  It is good to see this topic getting attention from the mainstream business press.

The other night I let my son configure a pair of Vans slip-ons for his 6th birthday. Watching him and his 3 year old brother navigate the process was informative. Two key things I observed:

• My son moused-over every single option for every single product part (not kdding…he methodically moused over every option). This was only possible because Fluid Configure uses client-side technology (Adobe Flex in this case) to do the image previewing, meaning you don’t need a round trip to the server to generate the image.  Using server-side imaging technology this could take an hour or more.
• My 3 year old son asked, “Can we turn it over?” Specifically, even as an observer to the process he wanted to view the product from multiple perspectives. While Vans doesn’t feature the incredible rotation of Your Reebok, but it does show the product from multiple views with great responsiveness.

Overall it was gratifying to see them  quickly grasp the experience, move through the configuration process and take great pleasure from the emails and SMS’s they were able to send letting their family know about the shoes they had just designed. If only the design of their shoes could have been so positive.

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.

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:

• A high level expert review of your online store, delivering a prioritized list of areas for immediate improvement including key dropout points in the conversion cycle.
• Targeted analysis of your product detail page and identification of key areas for improvement. Final deliverables include analysis of current page, redesigned schematics and a few visual design directions.
• Checkout flow analysis, investigating the process from cart to transaction and including detailed suggestions from wireframes to visual design.
• Web 2.0 interactive merchandising audit that identifies crucial areas for customer interaction and ways in which rich media can engage shoppers and move them toward a conversion. This solution includes design direction as well as creation of functional, production-ready interactive merchandising components.

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.