This is a story about how one Yahoo! Store merchant used FastPivot RTML programmers to update Coolibar’s Yahoo! Store with a custom product selection display and a real-time customer-oriented inventory interface–all without a single pucker from those glitchy lemons everyone in the ecommerce world hates to deal with.
When merchants first launch their online stores on the Yahoo! Store platform, there’s always a question about its limitations. Alan Higley, VP of Marketing for Coolibar.com says: “We feel there are no limitations working with the Yahoo! Platform; if we need something done, we have the FastPivot Team [of Yahoo! Store programmers] help us accomplish it. For example, we threw out the challenge of implementing a custom product selection display with a real-time inventory feature and they figured out a way to get it done!”
Custom Yahoo! Store Programming Gives Merchants Endless Possibilities
(The Interview)
What was the initial problem?
Higley: With our old product selection interface were we asking customers to do two things: browse the colors in our Fluid display, then after they would find a color they would want, they would have to then also click to the drop down and pick the color they’d already selected in the Fluid display. So, its kinda a double burden for the customer and in some cases a little confusing because they’d already chosen a selection on the thumbnail below the Fluid display. On a lot of sites when you do that you’ve actually already selected the color that you want to order. From our perspective and from the customers perspective it was a little bit confusing, so we wanted to clear that up.
How did Coolibar approach the issue?
Higley: Leu Daitzchman, our VP of Branding, created the vision of improving the customer experience (this idea of better interactivity between color selections and the fluid display and the idea of immediate feedback when you pick a size or color; what’s available and what’s not) All of what I call the customer experience was really driven by Leu and his team, and the ecommerce implementation that’s what went to me. I worked with FastPivot and other developers to get these implemented.
How did FastPivot (et. al) help enable Coolibar’s Yahoo! Store to work the you wanted it to?
Higley: FastPivot’s Tim Whitacre was the lead developer on this project and we brought in another developer to the from Minneapolis, which developed the creative assets. It was a very effective partnership for the implementations (there are two parts to implementation; RTML development work and the presentation layer which is mainly handled through CSS).
Now when you are browsing the colors you are getting both the fluid display and you’re making your selection for ordering at the same time. We have a handful of sites we compare ourselves with (major apparel retailers) and this type of activity is what we see on the major brand apparel sites. It’s even similar to the way you select apparel size and color on Amazon, where you have an interaction between the selections you’re making and what’s going on in the display.
The other thing is we’re giving immediate feedback to what’s available and what’s unavailable. If you make a size selection (i.e. item 01262) you immediately see which colors might be sold out or rather what’s avaible. If you want to shop by color, you click on color and you immediately see what sizes are available. So you can shop both ways and get immediate feedback.
How did you feel about working with the FastPivot team?
Higley: It was really great the way it worked out. What I really always appreciated about FastPivot is that they don’t mind working with 3rd parties. It was a very effective partnership to have our digital agency working on the design and to have that come to life with FastPivot’s programming expertise. Any Yahoo merchant would understand the balance between what can be done outside of RTML and what still has to be done inside RTML to get the stores to work properly. FastPivot doesn’t mind bringing other players in the mix and working in a really effective way. Another player in this mix was Fluid, our display provider. Tim worked very effectively with them to make display changes.
With help from FastPivot, you can hardly tell we are a Yahoo merchant anymore because out front end presentation outside of the cart is very customized. Out of 100 standard features in the Yahoo Store, we’re probably using one and the other 99 we’ve customized. So our front end presentation is very customized now. We decided that we’re not going to have any excuses for what we want to develop on the site. Inventory management has always been an issue for us and so that’s why we threw it out to FastPivot, saying ‘hey look we want to change the way this works, we want to have real time feedback to our customers on inventory availability.’ We threw the challenge out there and figured out how to get this done.
