Benefit Cosmetics

The Internet Retailer editors liked the bold graphics, video tutorials on how to use its cosmetics, along with the social features, including a tool that lets consumers post and answer product questions, and a social club that connects Benefit fans with others around the world.

Sur la Table

Innovative navigation that puts relevant deals right in the front of the shopper caught the attention of the editors when they reviewed Sur la Table. For this site, Fluid focused on interactive merchandising and conversion.

Wag.com

Fluid helped combine the hallmark efficiency of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com and Soap.com, to deliver a whimsical experience that changes the way people shop for pet supplies.  Internet Retailers’ editors noted the site’s novel navigation approach, which lets pet owners browse by animal type — not only cats and dogs — to find needed products in one section, each with its own color scheme that serves as an anchor. Wag.com has the benefit of learning from sister site Diapers.com, which was also developed by Fluid.

Follow this link to see the complete Hot 100 list of companies.

-The Fluid Team

At years end, Fluid celebrates ten digital retailers that took bold action in 2011 – some are our clients, some are not. The order is purposeful. We count down to the brand actions we see as boldest. The gauntlet for 2012 has officially been thrown. Fun.

Think there’s a bold action that should to be on this list? Send it on.

Happy Holidays,
Amy

Bold Action #10 NetFlix: Facilitate visual navigation just for kids
In November Netflix revised their Wii app to include a “Just for Kids” section, navigitable by cartoon and kid characters. The under-12s will never be computer-centric – design is changing accordingly. In fact independent of age, design for tablets and touch-screens began to heavily drive web design in 2011, instead of vice versa.

Bold Action #9 AmEx: Bolster small businesses with their own Saturday
AmEx isn’t a digital retailer but in a year of bold moves by payment systems (Paypal’s Facebook app, Square’s rise, etc.) they sparked digital commerce success. Lodged between Black Friday and CyberMonday, Small Business Saturday drove social traction, offline sales and fueled Davids over Goliaths. Another brand focused on small business buying, Etsy, saw 80% YOY CyberMonday sales growth.

Bold Action #8 Coach: Kick the purchase funnel to the curb
Rich, bold imagery conveys the sensory elements of Coach products in the magazine style format of their ecommerce site. It gets most interesting though (to us) when you go to buy. Gone are the traditional .pdp pages – product details and Add to Cart are treated in a quick view. And checking out is no longer a purchase funnel, it’s done all on one page.

Bold Action #7 JCPenney: Incubate companies to target market opportunity

JCPenney had proof of market opportunity in two areas: 1. Men’s style and 2. Gifts. Recognizing the strengths (and constraints) of the JCPenney brand they served as their own VC funder and incubated two new digital only ventures. Partnering with Hearst Magazines, CLAD and Gifting Grace were welcomed into the world this Fall.

Bold Action #6 ASOS: Trust a marketplace will amplify – not compete
ASOS is the UK’s largest independent online fashion retailer, offering over 850 brands and their own ASOS label. This year ASOS opened Marketplace which allows anyone, anywhere to sell fashion to anyone, anywhere. Indie labels, emerging designers, vintage boutiques and clothes hounds are encouraged to apply for a boutique. ASOS positions themselves as celebrators of fashion and takes a percent of sales.

Bold Action #5 Reebok: Showcase custom shoes for on-demand inventory

Customers love custom shoes. Reebok saw success grow and decided to give custom shoes their own shop. In 2011 it excelled. It’s fueled by attribution to the custom creators, design voyeurism and social sharing – social that also serves as ratings and reviews. Custom options permeate their traditional inventory for a persuasive cross-sell.

Bold Action #4 eBay: Declare ecommerce is dead and buried

John Donohue, CEO of EBay, declared the concept of ecommerce dead and buried. Consumers think shopping, not device. “Over the next 12-24 months we’re going to see an explosion of experimentation, and no one knows what’s going to take off and what’s not.” Right now it’s mobile – U.S. eBay mobile shoppers spent 2.5x more on CyberMonday than in 2010. PayPal Mobile saw a 552% YOY increase in global mobile payment volume for the same day.

Bold Action #3 Apple: Overtly and publicly celebrate the life of Steve Jobs On Oct. 4th Apple launched the iPhone 4S, on Oct. 5th Apple announced that Steve Jobs had died. Defying the speculation for years that Apple stock would drop upon his death, Apple owned the celebration of his life outright. The homepage of the Apple store honored him for days and Apple stores became pilgrimage sites of emotional expression. Consumers responded with an unprecedented outpouring.

Bold Action #2 Patagonia: Declare “Don’t Buy” on the years’ biggest shopping day

Retailers wait all year for Thanksgiving weekend and this year Black Friday and CyberMonday did not disappoint. In the flurry of price drops, limited editions and 4am store openings, Patagonia took a bold stand. A full page ad in the NYTimes and their home page declared “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” A stand for their Common Threads Initiative, the buzz was widespread and polarized.

Bold Action #1 Amazon: Reward consumers for price comparing

Yes people research online and buy in-store. Amazon is aggressively encouraging people to research in-store and buy online. This shift in behavior is significant for digital (and is happening independent of Amazon). Amazon’s advantages? Prices that benefit from large inventory and the lack of online sales tax. The controversy around their Dec. 10th promotion is likely to bootstrap mobile buying – and expedite the sales tax conversation.

As we enter the Holiday 2011 season, it is clear that mobile devices are playing a growing role in how people play, socialize, and shop. There are now 328 million smartphones, tablets, and laptops for the 315 million people in the US, and mobile web traffic has doubled in the past year. Currently, 37.4% of people in the US have a smartphone, and with 650,000 people switching from feature phones to smart phones every week, we are on track to hit 50% of people with smartphones by September 2012.

Apple still dominates the smartphone and tablet market, but Android has seen dramatic growth. Apple accounts for 43.1% of mobile devices and 58.5% of mobile web traffic, while Android accounts for 34.1% of mobile devices and 31.9% of mobile web traffic. Apple device owners are clearly very comfortable accessing the Internet via browsers and mobile apps, but combined with Android we have 63 million people accessing the web via mobile, and another 21.5 million when we add in Blackberry and Microsoft devices. That’s at least 84.5 million people on the web regularly via the most common mobile devices.

So, what are all of these people actually doing on their mobile devices? Recent data from the Pew Research Center identified the most common activities on mobile phones:

• 73% send and receive text messages
• 73% take photos
• 54% send photos (or videos)
• 44% access the Internet (via browser)
• 38% send and receive email
• 35% play games
• 34% record video
• 34% play music (Pandora reports that 50% of their traffic in August 2011 was to mobile devices!)

Other studies report that 58% of people read news on their tablets, and 25% do that daily. Socializing is also popular with 3 out of 5 mobile device owners reporting they are active on social networks, and 72.2 million people in the US accessed social networks and blogs via mobile devices in August 2011, a 37% increase over last year.

But what about mobile applications? As mentioned above, we’ve been monitoring the popularity and use of the mobile web and mobile applications over the past few years.  The trend is clearly toward using mobile optimized web sites for general activities and mobile applications for productivity, focused functionality, and brand-specific experiences.

How many mobile applications are being installed and used? In 2009, 22% of smartphone owners had installed mobile apps; by August 2011 that increased to 38%, and 75% of tablet owners report installing applications. More data from the recent Pew Internet research shows that:

• 68% of people with apps on their smartphones report using them
• only17% of smartphone owners use no apps (and only 8% of tablet owners use no apps)
• 51% of smartphone owners use 1-5 apps per week
• 31% (so-called “power users”) use 6 or more apps per week (while 39% of tablet owners fall into this category)

How are people using all of the mobile applications?

• 74% provide updates on news, weather, sports, and/or stocks
• 67% help communicate with friends and family
• 64% help people learn about something in which they are interested
• 53% help people find information
• 48% facilitate work-related tasks
• 46% are for shopping and/or making purchases
• 43% watch TV or movies online
• 35% retrieve information about en event
• 29% track and manage their personal health

Yes, you read that correctly: 46% of people who use installed mobile applications are using them to shop. This is a significant market and a huge opportunity. Forrester reports that mobile commerce increased 25% in the first half of 2011 (and mobile traffic was up 300% for Holiday 2010), and PayPal is processing more than $10,000 per minute in mobile transactions (at an average of 3 mobile transactions per second, they anticipate $3.5 billion on mobile payments for 2011!) So far in 2011, the average ecommerce site is seeing 10% of traffic from mobile devices, and that number increases to an average of 15% for premium brands.

Customers are increasingly comfortable with mobile shopping and making purchases via mobile devices, and they are not making only small purchases: in October 2011, eBay sold a $40,000 backhoe via mobile, and Blue Nile sold a a $300,000 diamond engagement ring via their iPhone app in September 2011. Blue Nile also reports that purchases in the thousands or even tens of thousands are “not uncommon.”

Acceptance of and attitudes toward mobile commerce are strong and positive. Recent analysis by JiWire shows that nearly three-quarters or more of consumers are comfortable buying on mobile devices, and older, more affluent consumers are more likely to make larger purchases.

For adults between 18-34 years:

• 73% are comfortable buying on mobile (14% are not willing to buy on mobile)
• 27% spend under $50
• 13% spend $50-99
• 15% spend $100-249
• 14% spend $250-499
• 17% spend $500+ (45% do research before spending $500 or more)
• 13% do price comparisons
• 23% research on mobile, but buy online (non-mobile)
• 15% research on mobile, but buy in-store

For adults between 35-54 years:

• 83% are comfortable buying on mobile (11% are not willing to buy on mobile)
• 18% spend under $50
• 13% spend $50-99
• 17% spend $100-249
• 19% spend $250-499
• 22% spend $500+ (34% do research before spending $500 or more)
• 34% do price comparisons
• 31% research on mobile, but buy online (non-mobile)
• 32% research on mobile, but buy in-store

Mobile commerce is growing rapidly, and both the mobile web and mobile applications provide opportunities to reach consumers and provide the information, features, and services they need to make purchase decisions and complete transactions. With nearly half of tablet owners reporting they made a purchase from their tablets, and with 111 million smartphones and tablets in use and growing quickly, now is the time to establish a brand presence in the mobile space.

The conference focused on designing for multiple screens, the intersection of design and technology, pushing the envelope of user experience, and to bring new, visionary energy to our work. Five very full days of labs, seminars, and sessions provided ample opportunity to learn from the experts, and I am honored to have been invited back to speak in two sessions.

On Tuesday, October 4 I spoke to nearly 170 people about “Making Better Design Decisions by Understanding How People Think.” We discussed how to turn merely adequate experiences on the web into more meaningful ones. People often complete tasks despite the fact that many interfaces seem intent on thwarting us; understanding how people perceive, think, learn, and remember can help us make better design decisions. During the session we identified common UX problems, discussed how people actually think, and showed how to modify the design options (in real-time!) to craft a better user experience.

Also on Tuesday I was a member of a panel discussion organized by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) where we talked specifically about how we leverage the Adobe design and development tools in our day-to-day workflow and processes. Fluid was able to show some of our ground-breaking recent and upcoming work, and the attendees asked great questions about our design, prototyping, and development process. I showed work from the same projects featured in the keynote address, and many people recognized it and were excited to see it in more detail and learn about we brought these innovative customer experiences to life.

On Wednesday, October 5 I spoke to about 70 people about how we use some of our design tools at Fluid on the Experience Design team in my “I Didn’t Know Fireworks Could Do That!” session. We explored some of the lesser known yet powerful features of Adobe Fireworks, an essential design tool that operates with both vectors and bitmaps and can span the design process from wireframe to comp. I showed how we use Fireworks with Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, and Flash Catalyst, as an integral part of our design and development workflow.

Finally, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the talented folks at Nerd Radio and talked with them for about 20 minutes about our work at Fluid, our workflow, and about the exciting new announcements from our interactive merchandising products team that we have begun to launch the latest updates that enable consistent and excellent customer experiences across multiple screens and devices – precisely the core theme of the Adobe MAX 2011 conference!

Overall, the conference was a great success. My sessions were well-received, Fluid’s work was showcased in front of thousands of attendees, and I had the opportunity to meet and speak personally with dozens of talented designers and developers from around the world. Now it’s time to start thinking about and preparing for the Adobe MAX 2012 conference next October!

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.

The four examples you need to see:

1. Etsy’s Gift Guide

The best use of Facebook liking data that I’ve seen yet. Pick a friend and Etsy matches their likes (and interests) to Etsy products. It’s a peep show of the possibilities this public data holds.

2. J.Crew’s Very Merry Gift Guide

This stands out for two reasons: 1. Talk about beautiful, curated collections. It tells a story that makes me forget that it’s cross-sell. 2. Of-the-month offering. Subscription selling finally meets style. Why aren’t more brands doing this? Expect them to be doing so in 2011.

3. Victoria’s Secret Gift Cards (on Facebook)

Sharing gets sexy. Not only can you comment on photos from last night’s holiday party, now you can share a gift card – without ever leaving Facebook. Buying just got easier for last-minute Lucys. (Starbucks has Facebook gift cards too).

4. Coach’s Gift List (on Facebook)

The ripple effect of Polyvore permeates this design (as it continues to do throughout fashion). Drag and drop from Coach’s yummy collection to a wish list within Facebook – and affiliate each item with a friend.

Who’s going to top this in 2011? Fluid has some tricks up our sleeve. Exciting.

Happy Holidays,
Amy

Unless you’ve been putting in time at a mountain monastery, you’ve heard about Google Instant: Google’s innovation launched yesterday to deliver real-time search results as you type keywords in the search box.

Much of the buzz has been around efficiency – getting better results faster. For digital retailers, I think the bigger significance is that Google Instant has transformed search into a great shopping jumping off point.

Searching is now browsing.

The experience Google Instant delivers is very similar to guided browsing (i.e. parametric filters) that you see often on ecommerce catalog pages like this one for The North Face. The consumer doesn’t have to know exactly what they want – they can simply select from a list and the site responds to their interests. It’s an iterative experience.

Like everyone else, I want a cashmere camel coat. In the screenshots above, you see that I get relevant shopping results at “camel cashm…” and can then easily browse between sweaters, coats, cardigans and scarves with the results visually updating real-time.

Google Instant will eventually come to Google Shopping.

It’s very significant that “Shopping” is in the primary navigation at top, prominently featured in the left navigation, and a link in the search results (e.g. “Shopping results for camel cashmere cardigan”). You can absolutely count on Google bringing the Instant capability to their Shopping tab, equipping consumers with shopping filters, view/sort controls, and taking the experience one step closer to a full shopping experience completely outside of retailers’ websites.

Portable content + SEO considerations.

What this means for digital retailers is two things at first glance: 1) increasing the quality and portability of your content, and 2) reviewing your SEO strategy in light of Google’s shift. I don’t have “how-to” answers for the above (yet) – there are many great conversations going on right now and what it means, ranging from recommendations that brands refocus on core/root keywords to povs that seo is now irrelevant because “no one will see the same web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible.”

What I know for certain is that digital consumers want the experience that Google is making a reality. Savvy brands and retailers will take advantage of it.

The title’s a lie. I love Gilt and have no intention of giving it up completely (even though the private sales aren’t private and they seem to selling every brand under the sun). But I did tire of receiving 1-2 emails every day and finally pulled the trigger and unsubscribed.

Treating customer service interactions as new opportunities to engage.

Gilt really gets digital customer experience. Instead of offering the usual insincere apologies, they deliver a beautifully designed ‘unsubscribe’ screen with an unapologetic “How can I help?” attitude that puts the consumer in control and makes them like Gilt more as a result. It’s very easy to choose “reduce the number of emails I receive” rather than severing the relationship completely.

Offering ways to connect on other channels / devices.

Better yet is that Gilt takes this opportunity to showcase other ways to connect that might fit better than email with one’s digital lifestyle, including the innovative desktop app Gilt Clock with a sale countdown timer, preview of upcoming sales and a link to the calendar. It’s not a leap to imagine them successfully promoting their mobile / iPad apps here as well. (Note: I took the screenshot above a month or so ago so they may already do this.)

I conducted a quick survey of other retailers’ ‘unsubscribe’ experiences. Most were purely transactional and forced the consumer to choose between ending their relationship with the brand or resigning themselves to the status quo (nobody wins in this scenario).

This is another example of the pure play retailers reinventing the details that traditional retailers might accept as established best practices. I think consumers appreciate it and suspect Gilt sees a return from the effort.