The Official Fluid Blog

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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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.

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.

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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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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:

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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.