The Official Fluid Blog

While the extraordinary growth of touch tablets and smart phones has been a boon for consumers, it’s restarted something akin to the browser wars of the late 90’s for retailers. Instead of being able to rely on most consumers browsing the web using a mouse, using one of a handful of major browsers and running a fairly new version of Flash, the playing field is now wide open. Touch navigation vs. point-and-click and Flash video vs. HTML5 are just a couple of examples. With the launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire this week, retailers have yet another device and proprietary browser, Amazon Silk, to add to the list.

Our mission for Fluid Experience has always been to make online shopping more engaging while decreasing production effort. With this in mind, we’re pleased to announce enhancements that optimize product and brand imagery presentation, regardless of the device. We accomplish this using a number of methods:

Product Displays - Our interactive product displays (zoom, color changes, views, etc.) now perform browser detection and serve up a Flash-based presentation if available. If not, we assume the user is on a touch-based tablet or smart phone and serve up an HTML presentation specifically optimized for touch navigation. For zoom, instead of forcing click-and-pan or mouse-over zoom gestures on the user, we rely on native pinch-to-zoom gestures that they already know. Plus, we do some special work behind the scenes to ensure the image stays crisp, even at multiple levels of zoom.

Shoppable Imagery – For adding interactivity to brand-based imagery, we’ve built a completely new, HTML-based component from the ground up. And don’t worry — ditching Flash doesn’t mean a loss in richness or interactivity. Our new Shoppable Image component allows for graceful crossfade and scrolling transitions. Hotspots and tooltips can contain and mix images and text. Rich fonts work out-of-the-box courtesy of Typekit. Fonts.com support is available as well.

Shoppable Video – Our Shoppable Video component detects user’s system in a similar way to Product Displays and serves up either a Flash or HTML-based presentation as appropriate.

And this is just the beginning: we see huge potential in how tablets and smart phones can really elevate the shopping experience and intend to continue to further optimize our components going into 2012. What’s more, we’ve expanded browser support so retailers can continue to upload an image once and rest assured that Fluid Experience will keep pace with the proliferation of new devices. Now and in the future.

Too often when shopping online, I run across amazing lifestyle images featuring a product I would like to buy (or at least learn more about) but the retailer makes it difficult or impossible to find. Typically I’ll click on the image only to be faced with a confusing category page where if I’m lucky, I might find the product I’m after.

The simple fact is that lifestyle imagery is engaging and fun: just look at the stack of Williams-Sonoma or Patagonia catalogs on the average consumer’s coffee table. However, turning that imagery into something web-ready by adding copy takes too much time and specialized resources (designers) and might even detract from the imagery itself. This is disappointing because as in the offline world, vivid imagery is engaging and can both build brand and increase the chance a customer will buy that item.
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Coach is the latest retailer to leverage Fluid products to launch a pop-up shop on their Fan Page within Facebook in just a matter of weeks. Take a look!:
Note: you’ll have to Like the brand first to access the exclusive, pre-sale content:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/Coach?v=app_130296760321957


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At Fluid, we continually look to the offline world to draw inspiration for improving the online shopping experience. Nowhere does this tenet drive our work more than Fluid Experience, our interactive merchandising tool.

When we think about great real world shopping experiences, there is a common theme to every flagship store and back alley pop-up shop: excellent product presentation. In the offline world, it’s guaranteed that there will be a real live product to pick up, inspect and share. You need only watch shoppers in a average apparel store to see how picking up an item, holding it up and glancing in the mirror creates an emotional attachment.

This simple act is so basic in the offline world that it’s too easy to overlook when envisioning the online experience. While best practices dictate things like the Add to Cart button being above the fold and intuitive search and browse functionality, it’s important not to lose sight of the basics:

Outstanding product presentation is a ticket to the game. Without it, consumers are may look elsewhere for this emotional attachment.

Scene 7 was kind enough to validate this philosophy in their recent “What Shoppers Want” survey. The Cliff’s Notes version is this:  shoppers want rich, vivid product imagery and the ability to browse views and colors and zoom in with simple mouse over actions. Clicking is too much work.  They want to “go big” and inspect every last detail of the product with minimal effort,  just as they would in the offline world.

At Fluid, we designed Fluid Experience from the ground up to produce rich, easy-to-use product displays that are unparalleled in the e-commerce landscape. Almost as important, we made them incredibly simple to build and change so you can experiment and find out what delights your customers.

In the spirit of going big, we took a few minutes to put together a demo that does just that. Simple mouse movements change views and expose zoom. Plus you can click View Larger for even greater detail and zoom. We think you’ll agree that it’s difficult to go back to just an average product image.

This is the first installment of a new Fluid Retail Tips and Tricks section of the Fluid blog. Our goal is to allow existing and potential users of our products to learn about helpful features quickly and easily, without digging through documentation. In addition, we’ll use this section to share e-commerce best practices and learnings from our customer community. This first installment focuses on Fluid Experience, our product designed for rich product display and interactivity:

Hot Folders!!!

Next week, we’re rolling out an exciting new enhancement which allows users to add or update images in Fluid Experience by simply FTP’ing them to our server. Our system will take it from there:

• Detect any images that have changed in your Fluid Retail FTP account.
• Import just those product images into Fluid Experience.
• Create any variety of optimized interactive displays and static images that you have defined in the admin tools.
• Deploy them to your hosting infrastructure using FTP, SFTP, WebDAV or RSync
• And we’ll even send a confirmation to your system of the products have been processed and are ready to go.

Assuming you use a standardized naming convention for your images (99% of retailers do), enabling this for your account is simple and straightforward. Plus you can choose how often our system checks for new images: nightly or more frequently.

At minimum, images should be named using some variation of product Id, variation Id and view name. However, you can also use the image name to specify display profiles, hex color values and image type (swatch or main.) For those of you who feel it’s important to be able to see product and variation names within the admin tool, we can make a call to your e-commerce system to retrieve this additional data via XML. This can often be leveraged from existing feeds such as those for recommendations engines.

Please contact Fluid Retail support to learn more about this new feature.