Flog: The Official Fluid Blog

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!

Estimating the value of design, particularly customer experience design, and the potential impact on conversion rates and revenue has always been difficult. It often requires making comparisons to past quarters or past years or simultaneously running different versions of the same site (e.g., traditional A|B testing), and it can be complicated by marketing campaigns and changes to advertising techniques and budgets than can alter the flow of traffic to a site.

The clever folks over at Teehan + Lax, a user experience consultancy based in Toronto, Canada, decided to gamble with $50,000 dollars of their own money to test a theory: companies that invest in customer experience design will have better revenue, greater customer satisfaction, and therefore perform better in the stock market. They selected 10 companies that are known for the use of experience design on their sites and held their stocks for 365 days, then they looked at the value of their UEX portfolio relative to the broader market indices. Their portfolio did very well:

“In the 365 days we owned our stocks the value of the portfolio increased 39.37%. This outperformed the major indexes (NASDAQ 18.09%, S+P 9.47%, NASDAQ 100 26.81%, NYSE 14.67%).”

Designing for the customer experience is not just for the good of the customer, it is also for the good of the company. Designing great customer experiences definitely has measurable value.

http://www.uxmag.com/strategy/327/investing-in-ux

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.

At the recent Shop.org conference we got a look at an interesting new outfit builder put together by, Oli a retail fashion site in the UK:

http://www.oli.co.uk/

They have really done a nice job with interaction design here. The Look Book bar is anchored to the bottom of your browser window and stays with you as you navigate the site. Every item in the catalog has an “add to look book” link, making the process for adding items fairly smooth, although a visual confirmation an item has been added to your Look Book would be a plus.

Upon opening the Look Book you enter a full screen environment that is intuitive and easy to use. Just drag-and-drop items from the Look Book strip into a work area and you are ready to go. Of particular note is the ability to scale individual product images so you can actually build a visual representation of an outfit with the correct proportions. The ability to add an entire outfit or collection to your cart at one time is another nice feature. Importantly, price and product detail information moves with the product and is available at any time.
The one thing that doesn’t work is adding individual items to your cart. The “buy” link is hidden behind an “i’ information button - not obvious enough. It would also be better if you could browse and add items to the Look Book while in workspace mode as opposed to having to go back to more traditional catalog browsing.

Overall, nice job.

– KD

Hey everyone - Nathan Moody here, Director of Creative Services here at Fluid, Inc. My first post on Flog brings some great news from my recent trip to South by Southwest [SXSW] .

I’m happy to announce that on Sunday, March 12, 2006, Fluid won the SXSW 2006 Web Award in the Business: For Profit category for our work on Timberland.com’s Custom Boot Configurator.

We’re obviously thrilled, and proud to have been recognized by the SXSW judges for creating a usable, fun, and innovative user experience that’s had measurable fiscal success for our client as well (how’s doubling customer conversion sound?). While I accepted the award, the true winners of this award are Fluid’s internal staff that worked on the project: Andrew Sirotnik (Account Manager, C0-Creative Director; Debbie Lefkowitz (Project Manager); Paul Spitzer, Darren David, and Ameet Mehta (Engineers); Brian Cherne (Information Architect); and Marty Kenney, Tom Hirashima and Jesse Gerstein (Interactive Media Engineers). I was the Visual Designer and Co-Creative Director.

We’d also like to thank our client, Timberland, for having the faith in us to take their product offering to the next level. Thanks especially to Troy Brown, Jill Areson-Perkins, and Joshua Deane at Timberland for their help, trust and deep collaboration on this project.

For more information, visit Timberland.com’s Custom Boot Configurator or read our case study on Fluid.com.

It’s with great pride that I announce two Fluid designed and developed projects have been nominated for Flashforward Film Festival Awards.

Both nominations were for RIAs we created. Under Best Application is the Build Your Own Boot application we created for Timberland. We were also nominated under Technical Merit for the RbkCustom RIA we created for Reebok. The Rbkcustom app has an extra cool feature. Even though the entire thing is Flash-based, we generate bit-for-bit perfect JPEG of the shoe you create that can be shared either via email or SMS.

Congrats to Ameet, Andrew x 3, Daniel, Darren, Debbie, Jules, Marty, Nathan, Paul and anyone else on the team I might have forgotten.