New research from Mintel and publicized by eMarketer further reinforces the importance of friends and family members in buying process. This is exactly the type of authentic peer-to-peer feedback, both asynchronous sharing through Facebook and real time collaborative shopping, we enable with Fluid Social.
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:
Several years ago, I had the “misfortune” of being introduced to my first digital SLR camera. I was immediately hooked and since then I’ve been suffering the same symptoms as all other camera hobbyists: a compulsive need to purchase (or drool over) expensive camera accessories and gear. So when I “need” more camera gear, I’ll go online to shop because, aside from the obvious convenience factor, I like the ability to bargain hunt and easily research products. But with so many online camera retailers out there, it’s getting pretty hard to differentiate between the sites. They all sell the same products, offer the same product information, in a similar layout. So when I do my research, I’m usually looking for two things - product price and customer product reviews. These are the two main components that really help me determine whether the product is highly recommended at a price point I’m comfortable with - which ultimately affects my decision to buy. But are there other things that retailers can do to help differentiate themselves above the rest?
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:
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.
A nice piece by Jennifer Saranow Schultz ran in the Wall Street Journal this morning describing how retailers are increasingly leveraging a shoppers’ social network to move people through the conversion funnel. In it Jennifer does a great job of capturing the key aspects of the Fluid Social product.
The data we’ve been collecting from our customer installations is proving that comments from friends are the most effective way to drive immediate increases in engagement and conversion. It is good to see this topic getting attention from the mainstream business press.
Parametric Navigation…it’s really just a fancy industry phrase for a filtered search, or parameters you can select to filter down results sets. So if I go to widgets.com and search for a widget, the site would present me with options to narrow my widget selection by price or rating or size or color, etc. The overall idea is that I can pick the individual attributes that appeal to me, and come up with a customized list of widgets that meet my specific needs. It’s my preferred search method, so I figured I’d tell you what I think works, and what falls flat.
I started with the list of Internet Retailers 2009 Hot 100 Retail Web Sites. I don’t quite understand how they came up with this list, given that some of these sites look like they haven’t been redesigned since the ’90s, but it seemed like a good baseline to use for my research.
My initial goal was to research and write a blog on sneakers, the sneaker culture, and what drives a ‘sneakerhead’ to seek the most limited/hard to get/wait-in-line-for-2 days type sneakers. But as I set out on my task to contribute to the Fluid blog, I stumbled onto the site miadidas.com. I say ‘stumbled’ because I have not heard or seen much about this site. I knew about NikeID, YourReebok(formerly known as RBKCustom), and the newly updated Vans Custom site among others, but was surprised and somewhat disappointed about just discovering the custom site for Adidas shoes. I’ve seen the in-store experience at the Adidas store in San Francisco, but was not aware it was migrated to the web – or at least a version of it.
With that said, I decided to focus my attention to the site and give my personal review.
The other night I let my son configure a pair of Vans slip-ons for his 6th birthday. Watching him and his 3 year old brother navigate the process was informative. Two key things I observed:
Overall it was gratifying to see them quickly grasp the experience, move through the configuration process and take great pleasure from the emails and SMS’s they were able to send letting their family know about the shoes they had just designed. If only the design of their shoes could have been so positive.
Synergy, forethought, planning, and commitment are commonplace words thrown around in the sales cycle for agencies pitching products and services the world over, industry-wide. Fortunately, these buzz words are not isolated to direct revenue-generating activities.
Team building can be traced back to the late 1920s when researchers conducted studies and observed worker productivity in a mid-West industrial facility outside Chicago called Hawthorne Works. Behaviorists studied groups of industrial workers in various conditions and determined that the most compelling evidence was observed in the building of a sense of group identity, a feeling of social support and cohesion that came with increased worker interaction. The study also demonstrated that workers had a tendency to perform at higher productivity at work-related tasks, most notably after performing non-work-related tasks. Shortly thereafter, the onset of company sponsored team building activities was born.
Fluid Social takes a fresh look at defining what social shopping is. It is the first product to focus on getting consumers the opinions that matter most - those of their friends and family - at the point they matter most - on your ecommerce site. The product’s genesis is from insights gained through years spent designing leading-edge ecommerce experiences on behalf of our clients. It has been in development for years.
We’ve written a whitepaper to articulate why this is such an important topic and how retailers can leverage existing friendships and social networks to improve the shopping experience, increase engagement and sell more. If you’d like to read the whitepaper please visit the Fluid website. If you need to read more about Fluid Social we can help you with that, too.