Face to Facebook
Visitors to Vans.com see a plethora of hip content more in line with a social networking site than an e-commerce venue.
There's the latest news about Vans Surf Team rider Dylan Graves, artist Marco Zamora and upcoming BMX events. There are links to skateparks, art, blogs and events like the Pro-Tec Pool Party, as well as links to more than 4,000 Facebook friends. Although the site features New in Shop ads for shoes, the true e-commerce experience begins when the user clicks shop.
It's on Shop.Vans.com that users witness cutting-edge platforms. The site encourages viewers to click custom shoes, where they can actually design their own shoes and chat with friends in real time to talk about whether the sneakers are cool enough to purchase.
Once gender, shoe type and size have been selected, customers can choose from among 20 designs that range from all white to purple-and-black checkerboard. Once the basic shoe is picked, the shopper can change just about anything – including laces, collar lining and foxing (the strip connecting the sole to rest of the shoe). During this phase, users can click chat to invite friends to view the design in real time, or they can e-mail or text an image of their creation in real time.
Vans' 12- to 24-year-old target audience loves this new feature, says director of e-commerce Katie Bongiovanni, in part because it helps ease what-will-my-friends-think? anxiety.
The platform on which this all plays out is Fluid Social from San Francisco-based Fluid, a provider of interactive merchandising software, custom design and strategic consulting. Fluid's other retail and manufacturing clients include North Face, Reebok, Timberland, Bare Escentuals and JanSport.
Fluid CEO Andy Lloyd says the Vans mechanism allows retail customers to interact with whomever they choose while shopping. For example, when friends are invited to chat during the designing of a shoe, they can actually change the shoe to their liking and send it back to the shopper. This feature is particularly important for Vans' audience, which often succumbs to peer pressure and truly cares what others think.
Teenagers don't necessarily want to be walking down the hall in something that their best friend thinks is dorky looking, Lloyd says.
Customer-generated product reviews have become staples of many e-commerce sites. According to ZenithOptimedia, however, recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touch-points when it comes to influencing purchases, and a Rubicon Consulting study found advice from friends to be more important than online reviews.
Fluid Social has been live on Vans' site since April. Bongiovanni says the results are promising, but that the company cannot judge the ultimate success of the platform on sales alone.
We want to see growth with our custom shoes, but there's an impact on our regular inline product, as well, she says. There's a viral effect associated with the brand and all our products.
Targeting social sites is nothing new for retailers, but there was the question as to whether to focus on users of MySpace, Facebook — or both. The marketplace took care of that debate, Lloyd says: Facebook recently surpassed MySpace in the number of active users, and the average Facebooker has 120 friends. Collectively, 58 million hours are spent on the site every day.
Facebook is an important aspect of Fluid Social because that's where you get the opinions of your friends and family, Lloyd says. From a retailer's perspective, the opinions of friends and family about a particular product are the most important thing when it comes to making a buying decision.
Interact within the site
According to a recent Fluid white paper, the traditional add to Facebook functionality posts the product to the top of shoppers' profile page for a day, but the buying decision process may take weeks or even months. In this scenario, when the Facebook user decides to shop, the product's comments are buried and valuable opinions are lost because they are stored as unstructured data.
Fluid Social integrates into a retailer's site and allows shoppers to interact with their peers from within the online store, using the social networking tools with which shoppers are accustomed to enhance engagement.
The most important way you can influence transactions in a retail environment is by getting [shoppers] the opinions of the people who matter the most — friends and family — when they're at the point of decision, Lloyd reiterates. What Fluid Social tries to do is actually integrate much more deeply into the online buying experience … so that [shoppers] actually have those opinions embedded directly in the product detail page.
Shoppers ask questions about products, create wish lists, suggest alternatives and comment on products within their Facebook network without leaving the product site. In the case of JanSport, those comments and ratings also appear on its site.
Audience access
By utilizing Facebook, you actually have access to a much larger audience, Lloyd says. If I was on JanSport and casually researching backpacks, I might want to share a product on Facebook and find out whether any of my friends had actually purchased that product previously. And a customer can log onto his Facebook account directly from the JanSport site.
That last point is crucial, Lloyd says, because it's important to influence the customer while he or she is actually shopping.
The problem with the e-mail to a friend is, I close my browser window and go do something else and I've left the store when I was on the cusp of making a purchase, he says. The reason we have a Facebook application and the capability embedded in the detail page on the retailer's site is because when you're shopping, you don't really want to leave the shopping experience, but you want to know what your friends and family think.
