The Latest Flash

Online retail’s weakness—that technology cannot re-create the brick-and-mortar world’s ability to see and experience products—has been offline retail’s greatest comparative strength. But continuing developments in rich media are changing that equation, as tools like Macromedia Inc.’s Flash move beyond their early shortcomings to bring more real-life experience into online shopping.

“Rich media are beginning to blur the lines between online and offline retailing,” says Fred Almond, director of marketing for Toys R Us Inc.’s ToysRUs.com and Imaginarium.com, which employ a variety of rich media. “The decision to buy is often made by viewing the Flash or streaming video instead of viewing the product in the store.”

Becoming ubiquitous

Just as in the brick-and-mortar world, effective merchandising boosts sales in the online world. Some retailers are reporting that rich media are the effective merchandising they need. While Toys R Us will not reveal the hike in sales that rich media have brought to its sites, other retailers are not as shy. EBags Inc. recently tested the effect of rich media by running two versions of eBags.com, one displaying products highlighted by rich media from Vendaria Inc., the other displaying the same products without rich media. The version with rich media produced a 19% higher sales conversion rate, says Peter Cobb, co-founder and vice president of business development.

That is within the realm of experience at other sites, says Mike McHenry, vice president of sales and marketing for Vendaria, which develops rich media projects based on Flash for dozens of retailers including eBags, Toys R Us, J. C. Penney Co. Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. “We’ve seen increases in online sales conversions of 10% up to 50%,” he says.

Rich media—particularly Flash—are expected to grow as a ubiquitous tool making web site merchandising and advertising more lively and interactive, according to web site designers and retailers. When it comes to exotic toys, flip-top cell phones or products like child car seats that raise questions about installation, online consumers are beginning to expect a near-real-life demonstration of how they function. “If you’re trying to show consumers how a complex product works—for example, you want to show them all the features of a cell phone—using Flash gives them the chance to play with the buttons and features and get a true sense of how the phone works,” says Nate Elliott, an analyst who specializes in rich media for Forrester Research Inc.

Furthermore, rich media can help customers better visualize a product’s dimensions and how it operates. “A static image doesn’t show scale,” says Rich Sadowsky, CTO of Vendaria. “A shopper can read text on dimensions, but with Flash or a video, she can see a vacuum cleaner in operation, how to change its filter, how well it moves over carpet, how to wrap the electric cord. That’s filling the gap between online shopping and real in-store shopping.”

In the advertising world alone, rich media will account for a rising percentage of online ad displays over the next several years, Forrester says. While expenditures on online advertising are expected to more than double by 2008 to $14.8 billion from $6.3 billion today, the use of rich media in online ads will more than triple, Elliott says. Although rich media include several forms, Flash dominates other rich media technology by a wide margin, he says.

Smarter carts

Elliott adds that streaming video will also increase in online advertising, as rich media and streaming media combined grow to account for 39% of online ads by 2008, up from 11% this year.

Moreover, newer versions of rich media are beginning to create ways of improving the online shopping experience. Macromedia, for example, is testing a Flash-based shopping cart on its own European e-commerce site. The Flash-based cart is designed to immediately update a shopper’s total purchase amount each time he adds a product to the cart, helping to prevent common online shopping errors like adding the same product to the cart more than once, says Forrester analyst John Dalton. The cart is also designed so a shopper can expand or contract it separately from shopping pages, allowing a customer to continue shopping while viewing what’s in the cart. Such features address common complaints about shopping carts and should help reduce abandonment rates, Dalton says in a recent Forrester analysis brief, “Shopping With Flash: Finally, a Smart Cart.”

No distraction

Still, for all the wonders of Flash and streaming video, retailers, developers and other industry experts caution that rich media should be used wisely. Despite rich media’s rising popularity, the technology is still known for negative characteristics that can disrupt the online shopping experience rather than enhance it. In spite of improvements in the last 18 months, rich media still require more bandwidth than is available to many consumers still on dial-up; rich media can require users to download a player that may not be supported on their home computer, and they can overwhelm online shoppers with moving distractions, making a web page appear more like a pinball machine than an organized place to shop.

“We want to use rich media on products that really need them for demonstration purposes,” says Almond of ToysRUs.com. “Otherwise, it becomes a distraction for site guests.” For example, ToysRUs.com uses streaming video to produce a real-life demonstration of the Screamin Serpent Roller Coaster from K’Nex. The demo, which is offered after a shopper has clicked on the product’s initial icon, details the roller coaster’s scale and operation by showing a child loading people figures into cars then the cars moving along the track. As the cars speed up and down the track, the demo provides the sound of screaming passengers.

The rich media demo serves to assure parents of the ability of young children to operate the roller coaster while also sparking more interest from children themselves, Almond says. “If you use rich media to create too many bells and whistles, you run the risk of distracting shoppers from finding what they want to buy,” Elliott says. “Flash is a really useful tool, but you don’t want to use Flash just for the sake of using Flash. It’s best to use it only where you can lend extra functionality to help consumers understand a product better.”

IRCE 2008 Conference Multi-Media CD-ROM

Moreover, if not applied properly, Flash in particular can prevent a web site’s appearance in the results of Internet searches, says Chris Winfield, president of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based design firm 10E20 Web Design. “The problem with Flash is that a search engine spider sees a Flash web site as mostly one big image, one file, so there are fewer keywords for it to read,” he says. “You can lose about a third of your search engine results.”

“Flash is great for a site like Nike.com, which doesn’t have to worry about search engine optimization because it has a brand people see 20 times a day,” he adds. “But smaller retailers have to rely on search engine optimization. The most important thing for smaller retailers is to get consumers to their site instead of to the 40 million other sites selling the same products.”

Matt Corey, vice president of e-commerce and marketing for home furnishings retailer The Bombay Co., says he’s concerned about providing a consistent shopping experience for all shoppers, regardless of what type of bandwidth or rich media player they use. “I don’t see us doing rich media any time soon, because I want everyone to have a common experience,” he says. “You could be on broadband at work and go home and be on dial-up, and I want you to find us at home as well as at work.”

Macromedia and other web designers say Flash can be modified so as not to interfere with web searches and doesn’t have to pose a problem with bandwidth. Sadowsky of Vendaria notes that web pages can be designed so that HTML tags are not only kept separate from Flash files but include data from rich media files themselves, making both a web page’s textual content and information related to the rich media file show up in Internet search results. “It all depends on how you build Flash onto your site,” says Forest Key, senior product manager for Macromedia.

Key adds that he expects Flash to be used more widely on web sites, as developers use it for building applications as well as enhancing images. “Flash started as a pure animation tool, but it’s moving into a position as a powerful application development tool,” he says. The latest version of Flash supports more high-level application development, plus new techniques that can combine Flash with HTML, he adds. Elliott cautions that such wider usage of Flash would place stronger demands on consumers to have the latest versions of Flash readers on their computers.

Elliott adds that all but the oldest of personal computers should be able to easily support Flash reader technology. And with rich media readers built into all new personal computers with Windows and Macintosh operating systems, it’s becoming rare that a computer isn’t equipped to view rich media — although consumers often still must download new versions of readers.

Easier job

Sadowsky says Vendaria designs rich media systems that detect the type of bandwidth and media players in use on a consumer’s computer, then adjusts the rich media output to suit their equipment. “We know what they’re using, so we deliver a Flash experience designed for the user,” he says.

To be sure, rich media is raising the image of the online medium as a merchandising and advertising venue. “Rich media can make my job easier,” says Almond, “because manufacturers may choose to demonstrate products online instead of, or in addition to, running a TV ad.”

paul@verticalwebmedia.com

Building an alternative to Flash

To assure performance in Internet searches as well as to avoid other frustrations that Flash rich media technology can bring to shoppers, such as making them download the latest rich media reader, it’s often better to use methods other than Flash to jazz up displays, says Chris Winfield, president of design firm 10E20 Web Design.

For example, he says, 10E20 will write more code to connect multiple GIF image files, making them alternately appear in the same space as if they were one moving image. Although this can take more time than installing Flash, it takes up less bandwidth and will not interrupt search engine crawlers, he says. “You won’t see an image traveling around a page this way, but you won’t lose out on search either.”

One e-retailer that has taken this approach, PCS-Ltd.com, has reported strong results in Internet searches while dressing up its pages with multiple text graphics that alternately fade in and out of the same banner space. A recent redesign of the site that emphasizes search engine placements while limiting moving graphics to alternating GIF files will lead to a 25% increase in sales this year over last, after several consecutive years of 15% growth, says president Anthony Croucier. “We’ve already seen an increase in visitor activity just by moving up in web page searches,” he says.