Rich Media and CSEs…

More and more retailers are experimenting with rich media on their websites; for those who like rich media, video, RIAs… and who speak french, there is RichCommerce.fr, a blog dedicated on rich interfaces applied to the commerce world.

But so far, CSEs were rarely mentioned when talking about rich media / RIAs. Today, ChannelAdvisor announces the acquisition of RichFX, a company whose goal is to “easily design, implement and manage effective rich media on all channels“. As explained by Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, this acquisition has the potential to bring rich media on CSEs:

What’s this mean for Comparison Shopping Engines?
One of the intriguing things to us about the RichFX acquisition is previously this technology was limited to only the websites of retailers.  Retailers spend tons of time and $ in their digital assets, and then when they put their products on CSEs, they are many time stuck with a flat stock-image that is usually teeny tiny.  Here’s an example of a boot search on shopzilla.

Imagine you are a boot retailer and you have implemented some really nice rich media on your website. What if you could syndicate that to the CSE and have that same rich experience happen at the CSE? Your clicks would naturally convert better and you’ll effectively leverage the merchandising experience throughout your channels vs. limiting it to just your website.

Of course its going to take a while for us to realize this vision, but thanks to RichFX, we are pretty close to having the pieces needed to make this happen.

That’s terribly interesting, and brings a lot of product questions. The first ones that came to my mind:

• How to integrate rich media using different technologies (Adobe AIR / Silverlight / Flash…) in a single destination?
• How will it distract the users when rich media is displayed? (I.e: merchants get more clicks thanks to rich media, even if they don’t provide delivery costs, has poor ratings…)
• …

Good luck to ChannelAdvisor to achieve this vision!!