Another innovative technique, made possible through RIAs, that is being adopted by companies is a smooth outfit configuration tool that uses a dress form as a virtual subject. This feature gives potential consumers the ability to drag and drop various clothing to assemble outfits. Some sites even have features where interactive models spin and twirl as customers mouse over them to show off the looks. Not only are customers able to see what the clothes look like paired together, but many of these tools also allow customers to price the outfits and add them directly to their cart.

American Eagle Outfitter's site Martin + Osa has these features and more - including models that prance in and out of the frame when a customer filters through collections. This clever, unique, and fun feature gives customers a more complete feel for the outfits. Martin + Osa also features a highly effective zoom capability. When zoomed, a product takes up the entire product-detail page and the informational and transactional product detail is opaquely layered on top of the zoomed image.

While this is an interesting take on the zoom feature, it is also highly controversial. Nothing should distract or hinder the customer from purchasing from the product detail page. Interlacing the product zoom image behind product information and order-taking functionality is perfect to attempt first on a retail concept site, but would be considered blasphemy on a major e-commerce site.

Social Shopping
Social shopping is a major focus for retailers today. Most of the current social shopping ideas are derivations of virally allowing users to put links or very simple widgets on social sites, or they are copycat social networking sites with some basic e-commerce built in. However, the addition of merchant blogs drives SEO (search engine optimization) and customer loyalty. In addition, allowing customers to refer to retail products through sites like Facebook, del.icio.us, and digg has become popular. Despite how mainstream these concepts have become, retailers still struggle with measuring the ROI associated with the techniques.

Done right, social shopping has tremendous monetization. However, most e-commerce solutions do not take into account how customers make their e-commerce decisions. Historically, information architects have a keen understanding of the mindset of a user and can construct optimal user interfaces for them. They worry about how the program is used, how easily information is found, and the feelings the program elicits. In order to optimize the social shopping experience, information architects need to begin thinking about this new social state of mind and have a general understanding of the desired behavior of the group. Retailers have mastered understanding and guiding consumer behavior for in-store shopping; however, their online counterparts are not as in tune.

Some of the successful standard principals in social shopping seem to be that users want to be anonymous, but not alone, creating buzz, but not annoyance and any feeling of belonging or exclusivity is a good thing. It is a generational phenomenon driven by a younger generation that craves having an online identity. Keeping these characteristics in mind, it is important that the social mindset is identified first and then the features and functionality are created to fit the desired experience.

An example of this is a concept called private event retailing (PER) - the events are first-come, first-serve and run for a limited time with a limited inventory. Shoppers are given exclusive access to premium goods at private sale pricing. Being offered a special deal via a limited time event, as in PER, the experience becomes even more exciting because of the exclusivity, setting the stage for a frenzied shopping experience. Updating the site in real time, to show items as they are sold out, drives an emotional mindset for the group. It is a retail concept that spreads virally and effectively taps into crowds.

Retail Convergence, a company with a portfolio of ecommerce sites, wanted to create an invitation-only, event-based ecommerce site. RueLaLa.com was developed in response to this. The social shopping concepts integrated into the site are innovative and branded specifically to enhance the PER experience.

In addition to the standard ecommerce functions - product catalog, product detail, shopping cart and checkout - RueLaLa.com focuses on features like how the invitations are sent and how the events are created. Almost all of the effort involved in constructing RueLaLa.com was spent on the unique retail concept because the back-end e-commerce capabilities leverage services that already exist within Retail Convergence. Time was not wasted on building baseline e-commerce functionality.

Driving a Unique Brand
A wide variety of sites are created to drive unique brands. The fundamental idea behind all of them is to push products over a variety of retail concept sites by leveraging existing merchandising capabilities, with each one focusing on a different customer demographic. For example, Anthropologie's site is targeted to a very different audience than its parent company, Urban Outfitters, and Arizona Jeans has a very distinct look and feel from its parent company, JCPenney.

Each site effectively targets different demographics. Both JCPenney and Urban Outfitters are selling their products in very different ways using these distinct digital properties through the use of their core abilities to merchandise products on their sites.

How to Build Microsites
Now that we've discussed retail concepts, it's time to build the microsite. The effort's primary focus should be the user interface, with only 20 percent of the effort being devoted to back-end functionality. Do not create a new back end for your retail concept because it's too hard to maintain. If the previously existing main retail site has the basics - such as checkout, pricing and promotions engine, tax and shipping costs and order management - it should be used to build a new retail platform.

The user interface engineers need an interface that can be altered and adapted quickly, with little to no architectural hindrances. If the existing retail platform cannot readily support the back-end e-commerce features, a lightweight service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be put in place. The SOA can handle the translation of the new retail concept UI to the back end of your existing retail store. This should eliminate any difficulties presented by previous back-end features.

With this perspective, a retail concept site allows IT owners a realistic path to evolve the existing application architecture to a far more agile one - while simultaneously allowing retailers to readily meet the innovation demands and achieve measurable e-commerce growth via retail concept sites.