The Official Fluid Blog » katherine

Rotating Interactive Banners

katherine — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:52:39 +0000

Here at Fluid, we believe retailers need to make the most of their page real estate. With so many products and specials to feature, retailers need a clean and elegant way to present engaging content to their customers. Using interactive banners that rotate on your homepage or category landing pages is a very effective way of doing that, enabling you to present your customers with much more rich and enticing imagery. With Fluid Experience, you can make those banners easily and quickly.

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Fluid Experience’s Merchandiser component enables merchants to frequently update their site with fresh content without having to involve the IT department. Merchants simply upload content to the administrative tools, group them into a merchandiser and then deploy. The whole process takes a matter of minutes. The look and feel of the merchandiser is template based and can be configured with brand appropriate themes. This allows business users to add new content without worrying about veering off design. You can also customize the interaction your users experience, allowing them to navigate through banners with seamless cross-fading, scrolling or pagination. Our Merchandiser component can also contain shoppable lifestyle imagery and interactive SWFs for an extra degree of interactivity.

To learn more about implementing rotating banners on your site, contact support@fluidretail.com

Fluid Retail Tips – Recently Viewed Products

katherine — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:40:06 +0000

When shopping online, I sometimes feel like I have the memory of a goldfish. I look at so many products when browsing a site that it’s hard for me to go back and find the ones I really like. Hitting the browser’s back button helps me find maybe the last 2-3 products, but what about the 15^th? Also, it’s not usually a straight path from one product detail page to the next. Throw in category, search and promotional pages and then hitting the back button becomes a real chore.

To save your customers from back button overload, you can use Fluid Experience to effortlessly display recently viewed products. With Fluid Experience, adding a recently viewed merchandiser takes minimal IT setup and maintenance. It allows you to easily store and retrieve a user’s recently viewed items. Each time a user visits a product detail page, Fluid Experience will store the product in a cookie. Then, on the next page load, the product will display in a Fluid Merchandiser. The merchandiser that displays the recently viewed items is template-based. So, it can be easily customized to match the look and feel of the rest of your site. It also allows for a wide variety of options for presenting recently viewed products. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

Timberland UK

Timberland keeps the recently viewed merchandiser in the navigational panel through the site. So, regardless if customers are on a product detail, category or search page, they can always see their recently viewed products. Also, by simply clicking on the product image in the recently viewed merchandiser, the customer is taken to that product’s detail page where they can easily add it to their shopping cart.

Another great example is on the Fine Stationary site:

Here, Fine Stationary uses a merchandiser with a few added features. The 2 buttons at the bottom of the merchandiser allow the user to either go directly to the product detail page of a recently viewed product or to see a list of all the products they’ve viewed so far. The “View All” button is extremely helpful in this case. It allows the user to see all the products they have viewed next to each other, making it easy to compare products.

For more information on how to add a recently viewed merchandiser to your site contact support@fluidretail.com

Fluid Retail Tips: “Look Mom, no hands!” – Complete Automation for Image Processing

katherine — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:07:58 +0000

This installment of Fluid Retail Tips will focus on the automation capabilities within Fluid Experience. With the ability to automate most tasks, Fluid Experience allows merchandisers to quickly publish their product imagery with ease. The publishing flow usually consists of the following:

IMPORT: Product data and images are uploaded to Fluid Retail through XML, Hot Folder or CSV
CREATE: Interactive display and static image creation within Fluid Retail
DEPLOY: Deployment of assets from Fluid Retail to customer hosting infrastructure

Each of these tasks can be configured to run as individual jobs or sequenced jobs. The jobs can also be sequenced in a number of ways. For example, one could sequence a Create and Deploy job. Another example would be an Import, Create, Deploy to Staging Server and Deploy to Production Server sequenced job. To configure a sequenced job that best fits your workflow, please contact support@fluidretail.com.

The jobs above can be triggered with the following methods:

Jobs Panel: Login to the admin tools and go to https://www.fluidretail.net/joblist.html in another browser tab or window. Here you will see any jobs configured for your account.
Scheduled: Jobs can be scheduled to run at a time of your choosing and as many times a day as desired. This method does not require merchandisers to log into Fluid Retail. The image publishing will automatically begin at the specified time(s). Please contact Fluid Retail support if you would like to schedule a job.
Triggered by a remote system: Product catalog refreshes can be triggered via web services. You’ll find more information about Remote Job Invocation here.

Finally, you can now receive email notifications when your jobs run. To subscribe to these emails, go to the Administration and the Users tabs in your Fluid Retail account. Click on the “Manage Subscriptions” button to sign up to receive email notifications.

Please contact Fluid Retail support to learn more about these features.