We’re excited to point you to a new and improved version of our Friend-Based Merchandising on the JanSport site. The new release not only allows shoppers to see their Facebook friends’ comments on products on the shopping site but it also allows users to start their product exploration from within the JanSport site by clicking on the “My Friends Like” tab. It also pulls comments from friends to feature them more prominently on the site. It also posts to your news feed when you comment on a product or ask a question and features a Facebook application that allows you to zoom in and see a product in multiple colors.

We’re excited about the new release but can’t wait to hear your thoughts. Let us know what you think.

In some cases, catalogers have uploaded versions of their print catalog to the web. While there are legitimate reasons to do this, Fluid’s customers have generally found results from these efforts disappointing. Conversion rates are low, as you would expect from directly translating a print layout to the web. Even with the fancy page flipping affect many of them add .

In other instances retailers have simply taken the existing photo assets and overlaid merchandising text in Photoshop. While this serves the purpose, this text frequently looks cluttered and may significantly lessen the brand impact of the photo. These photos were taken to create an emotional connection between the shopper and a brand or product. Reading text overlays certainly lessens the visual impact and can also distract from the emotional connection of envisioning yourself in the scene.
Other retailers have used these assets as the basis for a richer shopping experience, creating tooltips that appear on mouse over. This is a great use of interactive technology but up to now has been resource intensive to produce. The manual production required to update a banner has required a designer to create the visual and an engineer to wire up the custom Flash or AJAX technology. By the time the banner is integrated into the site it could be a week or more later.

The Fluid Retail team has recently released an enhancement to Fluid Experience that allows retailers to more efficiently use rich brand photography on their site. Using our authoring tools virtually any member of the production team can pull in existing photography, mask out and associate products and publish the assets to the site without need of any technical skills. The whole process can be completed in a matter of minutes.

I’ve embedded an example of the type of interactivity that is possible with Fluid Experience below. Note that shoppers are able to learn about all the products shown, without leaving the photography that has engaged them. Combined with a quick shop window and mini-cart, this type of interactivity encourages the purchase of multiple products.

It is also worth noting that this merchandising component is embedded using Fluid Social’s content syndication capabilities, that allow anyone to take your site content to iGoogle, blogs, MySpace or Facebook.

As I said earlier, the real magic behind the Fluid technology is the authoring tool that eliminates the need to have Flash developers or IT involved in publishing new assets to the site. If you are looking for better ways to engage shoppers with rich product photography you should contact us to learn more.

The spirit of what The North Face is doing is something a lot of brands are considering and is captured by the following quote from Kent Deverell, a founder of Fluid, “…in the last year and a half, with the rise of social networking, consumers are becoming content-creators themselves. The new paradigm is to get people involved and allow them to own the brand.” Scary stuff. But is there really an alternative?

Conversations about your brand are going to occur online, like it or not. Postive or negative. Isn’t it better to facilitate the conversation than sit idly by while it swirls around you? The North Face has been forward looking in many ways. By embracing the convergence of professional content, user generated content and product merchandising in their WWW and widget strategy they show they are continuing to engage brand advocates in new and interesting ways.

We look forward to more exciting ideas from Sarah Gallagher and her team!

The specific implementation for The North Face is available for users to embed as a Google Gadget and is also being served to highly targeted snowsports sites in the Google ad network. The gadget offers a mix of brand experience – a fresh snowsports-focused video each day that is user contributed or one that features The North Face’s athletes – and interactive shopping. While shoppers watch a video they can explore The North Face’s Defy line of snowsports gear, including the ability to interact with the products.

At Fluid we believe this merging of compelling brand content and merchandising is one of the under-utilized opportunities available to retailers and branded manufacturers. Allowing brand advocates to enhance their own personal pages with this content is a win-win for consumers and brands. We have already heard a range of great ideas from our other customers for how they plan on using our tools to extend the reach of their brands beyond their online stores in unique and brand appropriate ways and we can’t wait to hear more.

The North Face gadget features a fresh video every day.

Shopppers can explore The North Face’s Defy product line while watching the video, without leaving the site they are visiting.

It is possible to explore The North Face’s products from within the gadget using Fluid Retail’s interactive components.