The Official Fluid Blog

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.

(more…)

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.
(more…)

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:

(more…)

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.