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.

In this case, Fluid Agency redesigned ElieTahari.com to create a beautiful, branded, and richly interactive website by layering the Fluid Experience imaging solution over the Demandware SiteGenesis ecommerce platform. We took the visual merchandising tools of Fluid Experience and raised them to a new level, seamlessly integrating them throughout the entire site in a way that complemented and enhanced the ecommerce best practices of Demandware SiteGenesis. Check out the ETC section to see how we used Fluid Experience to blend editorial content with shoppable looks. Fluid Experience isn’t just an accessory thrown on to give a static site some personality, but rather it is the fabric that holds it all together to tell the story of the products and the brand.

One of the coolest things about this project is that it also includes the first mobile site we’ve done since launching an HTML version of Fluid Experience. That means it doesn’t matter what kind of mobile or tablet device customers are using to view the site, it always looks great.

To make all this possible, the Fluid product team built completely new HTML based runtime components and corresponding business-user admin tools to create and maintain a wide variety of branding banners. They also built a Demandware cartridge for Fluid Experience to make future implementations on the platform a breeze.

From a design perspective, the challenge was to create a look and feel to match the modern sophistication of the Elie Tahari brand. Fluid’s role in helping to define the photographic direction was a key component of the design’s success. Our creative director, Mariana Bukvic, was able to be on site for the photo shoots, brief the photographer, co-art direct and guide the post-production. Often, we have to work with clients’ existing photo assets, and the fact that we were able to advise and collaborate with Elie Tahari from the start made a huge difference.

The combination of Fluid Experience, Demandware, and our strong interaction and visual design resulted in a site that was built efficiently but looks and feels completely custom. It’s like getting a perfectly tailored couture outfit without having to pawn your Bentley.

Contributors: Brian Biggs, Mariana Bukvic, Davi Ellis, and Margo Silver.

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.

Fluid Experience to the rescue…

The shoppable lifestyle imagery component of Fluid Experience allows business users to add helpful tooltips to images so your customers can find what they want more quickly. The functionality is templatized so you can preconfigure brand appropriate fonts, colors, styles, etc.  allowing your designers to rest easy knowing business-types won’t meddle with their design. Once the banner is created, it can be previewed and then deployed to your site right from the Fluid Retail admin tools allowing you to push new banners live in less than five minutes.

What’s more, you can omit tooltips and add arbitrary links to various calls-to-action throughout the banner. Finally, you can place multiple banners into a merchandiser which allows users to navigate through elegant cross-fading or scrolling.

Satisfy your user’s need for interactivity and make better use of your brand imagery. Contact support@fluidretail.com to learn more about shoppable lifestyle imagery today.

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

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.

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

• 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.

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.