Flog: The Official Fluid Blog

Based upon our work with leading brands like Timberland, Design Within Reach and Reebok on their custom product offerings we frequently field calls from potential customers looking to either start a custom program or to evolve their existing offering. In many cases these are customers looking to move from first generation (often hard-coded and rigid) technology to a system business users can update (without a PhD in computer science from Stanford).

There are a lot of challenges associated with selling a configured product. Many of these are outside the scope of what we normally do at Fluid. But the custom product business is challenging and specialized enough that we have developed a deep understanding of much of what it takes to get a custom program running, whether it is part of our traditional offering or not. In this post I’ll explore a few of the considerations many people fail to keep in mind as they embark upon a custom program. In a subsequent post I’ll discuss Fluid’s product and services offering and how it is designed to address many of these challenges.
A few of the frequent stumbling blocks we encounter at Fluid include.

• Getting the product built: This seems like an obvious one but you’d be surprised how often we spend time talking to customers only to learn they haven’t thought through this specialized manufacturing process. While most of these people have an existing manufacturing business few take into account the challenges of taking a factory (and it’s employees) designed to mass-produce items by the hundreds of thousands and produce items one at a time. Doing so efficiently and reliably should not be taken for granted.While this topic is outside the scope of both Fluid’s skillset and this post, it is frequently the point many companies’ dalliances with custom products end. It’s that little detail - actually getting the product customers order built and shipped to them in a timely manner - that trips them up. (NOTE: for those of you considering a custom program we have a handful of companies that specialize in this type of manufacturing that we can point you to)
• Accepting orders in your platform: Next, there is the processing of orders through the customer’s ecommerce system. In the same way that many factories are designed to produce standard products not custom ones, many ecommerce systems are designed to produce products that can be represented by standard SKUs (style-color-size). After all, this is what happens for about 99.5% of all ecommerce transactions.Accepting an order for a product with as many customizable attributes as on Reebok Custom (up to 30 on some products) that can come in more than 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different variations is simply not something the typical ecommerce system is designed to do. Some do it more gracefully than others. At Fluid we have successfully integrated with Demandware, GSI and GSI’s Aspherio as well as home grown systems and have investigated many, many others. We can help you understand what to look for when evaluating if your platform is a fit.
• Shopping cart: Allowing customers to gracefully move from product configuration to checkout (And back!Customers are rarely 100% decisive and may want to return to a design and tweak certain aspects of a design, especially when configuring 6 or more attributes) and see their product, as they configured it, in their cart is an important part of the conversion process. Does your shopping cart support custom products? And if there is a way you can wire it together and make it work, is there an easy way to re-enter the configurator?
• Integration into the site: Many manufacturers treat custom products as “special.” And they should, custom products typically engender positive customer perception, generate brand attachment and sell for a premium. But by treating them as special they are too often relegated to a separate part of the site or even a micro-site. This makes them difficult to find and the outcome is lower traffic, fewer sales and a disintegrated experience. Timberland is a brand that has done a nice job of integrating customizable products into the main shopping experience, increasing visits and sales.
• Reporting: Given all the challenges associated with accepting orders and getting your product built, is it any wonder people rarely think of how they’ll understand what people actually buy? And frankly, when we ask customers what they would look at if they were able to see reports, the answers are not resounding. Since every order is different there would be very few commonalities in configuration. But looking that most frequently ordered color on a per-attribute basis and a few other reports can be a very valuable tool. The value of reporting and measurement should never be overlooked as we try to build measureable, constantly improving ecommerce offerings.

If this whole thing sounds overwhelmingly complex, there is hope! It has been done many times before (it gets easier every time). While technology may not have progressed to the point just anyone can set up a factory and build-to-order, increasingly brands are experiencing success with their custom programs. This success can take the form of improved brand perception, higher customer engagement and, most importantly, increased revenue by offering custom products. Also, technology is catching up. In my next post I’ll go into more detail about how Fluid helps customers deliver award winning (SXSW, Webbys etc.) product configuration experiences.

In the mean time, please feel free to contact us with any questions about getting your custom program off the ground.

As a company exclusively focused in online retail it is important for our employees to stay abreast of the latest developments in the industry. One problem we ran into was asking all our employees to subscribe to a variety of news sources. Some had RSS feeds, some news came via email and others you had to remember to visit their site regularly.

To ensure everyone at Fluid is on top of the latest ecommerce news an engineer created an aggregated news feed from a variety of the leading industry publications including Internet Retailer, Ecommerce Times, Clickz and Storefrontbacktalk.com. People at Fluid love it so much, we’re making it available to our customers, partners and anyone else that is interested. If there are other ecommerce news sources you access regularly please let us know and we’ll do our best to add them.

If you’d like to subscribe, please use the link below. If you run into issues let us know (some sources come through better than others) and we’ll try to clean them up.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/fluid_online_retail/ecommerce_industry_news

An interesting article ran in this month’s issue of Stores Magazine that talked about The North Face’s interactive marketing efforts, specifically the work they have done with Google Gadgets and Google Gadget Ads (more on that in a later post).

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!

Today Fluid announced the immediate availability of Fluid Social, which allows retailers to offer the same level of interactivity and control in social networking widgets and Google Gadget Ads as they have over the merchandising on their own site. While there have been a recent flood of announcements about retailers deploying widgets to social networking sites this announcement is notable in that this is the first productized offering that allows merchants to publish and update gadgets as they see fit, using the same visual assets and interactive technologies that they use to merchandise their own site. No longer will merchants worry about a gadget that was embedded months ago featuring products that are no longer in stock. They are in complete control of both the featured content and products.

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.

As retailers brace for the possibility of a significant slowdown in consumer spending, ecommerce managers should be prepared to articulate to management why this is exactly the wrong time to be cutting online retail investments. A recent article in Internet Retailer drives home the point:
http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=24807

The article outlines a powerful argument in favor of investing online. While offline sales were off by 0.4% versus a year earlier, online sales are up about 22%. While bad weather was cited as a reason, online’s imperviousness to factors such as bad weather and high gas prices only reinforces that the online channel is the place for retailers to invest.

Looking forward, whether the consumer credit crunch has an impact on consumer spending or not, retailers can expect to see double digit growth in online sales. And with growth like that the online channel is still definitely the place to invest.