When 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. launched one of the first web stores on Facebook.com in July, it also learned a valuable design lesson: throw out conventional wisdom.
As a pioneer in telephone and online flowers and gifts retailing, 1-800-Flowers had years of experience designing full-fledged e-commerce sites with sophisticated product pages and advanced features and functions. But designing a web store that would work successfully within the limited space of a social network page was a challenge. Another obstacle was creating a secure e-commerce application on the 1-800-Flowers page that motivated visitors to shop while they were busy communicating with family and friends. “When members are engaged on Facebook, they don’t want to leave the site and go elsewhere to shop online,” says 1-800-Flowers senior director of web merchandising Vib Prasad.
Lessons learned in building a mobile commerce site in 2007, combined with usability testing, helped the internal design staff at 1-800-Flowers to streamline the way shoppers find and order floral gifts online while engaged on Facebook. To make its Facebook web store prominent—but not intrusive—1-800-Flowers also worked closely with Alvenda Inc., a Minneapolis ad network and e-commerce applications developer, to create a simple design and storefront that enables visitors to purchase flowers in only three steps.
To create the right design, 1-800-Flowers first installed a shopping tab and located the tab at the top of its Facebook page. 1-800-Flowers then developed the page with several other links and floral images that visitors could click on to be automatically redirected to a web storefront. The new storefront closely resembles 1-800-Flowers’ mobile site, 1800flowers.mobi. Like the mobile commerce site, the storefront 1-800-Flowers created for its social networking page includes some advanced features such as site search, a shopping cart, featured products, product images and pop-up windows that give visitors more detail about a particular floral arrangement
It took 1-800-Flowers about three months to design the Facebook web store and about one month to incorporate Alvenda’s e-commerce technology. The technology, which Alvenda calls a shoplet, allows consumers to shop e-commerce sites from online ads placed on third-party web sites. Shoplet display ads look like any other display ads on the web until customers interact with the ad by moving their mouse over it and then clicking on the ad to expand it into a fully functioning shopping space. Customers can browse the advertised products and make purchases directly from the shopping space without leaving the site on which the ads are published.
Future versions of the retailer’s Facebook store will offer additional social features, including birthday calendars and group gift-giving options. The retailer also expects to eventually roll out additional Facebook stores for its other retail floral, gifts and food brands, which include FannieMay.com, ThePopcornFactory.com and PlowandHearth.com. “The most important new features will leverage the social components that are native to Facebook and the intrinsic social nature of shopping, such as sharing with your friends the things you want most, being notified when your friends buy you something, and even purchasing an item with a group of friends for a mutual friend,” says Prasad.
There will be a presentation on The risks and rewards of advanced design technologies by Roger Lopez, consultant, Gomez, and Rob Miller, e-commerce manager, The Talbots Inc. Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference, Feb. 15-17 in Orlando.
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