Verizon recently launched an awesome new Flex based online store for selling ringtones. The Verizon Media Store allows users to easily browse available ringtones and "ringback" tones, and to purchase them for Verizon mobile devices. Prices appear to range from $1.99 to $2.99, depending on the song, with some "Jukebox" items available for $6.99. (A Jukebox appears to be a bundle of ringtones or ringback tones.)

The store is well done - a great example of using Flex to build a compelling user experience.

From Ted Patrick.

Cartfly is an online e-commerce widget platform that allows anyone to setup an online store and then embed that store wherever they want - a Facebook page, blog, website etc... The widget is a Flex widget, complete with shopping cart. When you check out, the user is sent to a PayPal page to pay for the items in their cart. Cartfly takes 3% of the total price as their cut.

Creating a store and adding products is done inside a Flex application. You can set some basic properties for your store, like a custom logo, font colours, etc... and add as many products as you want. Once your store is setup, you can select how you want to share the store - and code for embedding it is provided to you.

The idea is good, but the stores that are created don't look that great (in my opinion). Also, the buying experience isn't that great - PayPal requires customers to visit their HTML site to pay. This means that customers will go from a Flex interface to an HTML page - not very nice, and not very well integrated (this is a PayPal limitation for the most part, not a Cartfly... Although with PayPal Pro (only in the US) you could keep them in the Flex application without sending them to the HTML page.) One of the benefits of an RIA is keeping the user engaged in the RIA through checkout, something not being done in this case.

As I said though, the idea is good. I'd like to see something similar for Amazon or my eBay auctions. (Maybe someone will do that for the eBay widget contest.)

Via Venture Beat.

I'm working on my keynote presentation for tomorrow's talk at the DC PHP Conference and I came across a cool video of the Allurent Desktop Connection that was shown off at MAX. If you haven't seen the videos or seen what Allurent is doing with Adobe AIR, Flex and e-commerce, then take a few minutes out of your day to check out the video. The example in the video shows a desktop version of an Anthropologie store.

Ryan Favro has created a cool proof of concept application for ordering pizzas online, with the entire customer facing application, and backend application, done in Flex 2. Having gone through the pain of ordering pizzas online from Pizza Pizza, this application is definitely a move in the right direction, even if it's entirely fake. The existing HTML applications that are used for online ordering are far from a pleasing end user experience, and as he points out in some of the comments, this would surely increase the customer satisfaction and coversion rates for online pizza shops.

Check out this and other cool rich Internet application stories at the new RIA Digg like website.

This one's for Duane Nickull, who always orders the wines when we're out for dinner. Worlds Greatest Wines is a website dedicated to wine connoisseurs. The site provides reviews and an online store for wine enthousaists to gather and purchase their favourite vintages.

The online store is built using Adobe Flex. Like other Flex based ecommerce solutions, the store allows users to drag and drop items to their shopping cart. A future improvement would be to include the checkout screen into the application. Currently you need to leave the Flex application and then head to an HTML page for checkout. Hopefully they're working on that, so visitors and customers get a seamless experience right through the entire purchase process.

Zoom 360 announced a new Flash-based product display that allows cutomers to zoom in on a product and rotate it a full 360 degrees. The company has some sample product displays that showcase the use of this technology.

The company will license this technology to companies that want to use it in their own online stores.

Just another step in the evolution of ecommerce online. I've posted other stories about how Flash can be used to transform the buying experience online, and why companies like Nike are using Flash for some of their ecommerce activities: rich Internet applications provide a better user experience, and this translates into higher customer conversion rates, and higher sales.

TechCrunch has the story of a company called Goodstorm that has launched a new Flash based website for creating custom t-shirts. I'm familiar with CafePress, as I use it on other sites that I run, and this is similar.

The difference that I see between this and sites like CafePress is that the customer can actually create their own t-shirts here easily. The site owner simply needs to upload the artwork, and the customers can customize the t-shirts as much as they like. CafePress allows the owner of the site to create custom t-shirts, but the customers have to purchase what the owner thinks is the right design.

Rich Internet Applications provide a higher ROI than typical HTML based websites because the checkout process is simpler. Users end up purchasing more and spending more with single screen applications than wizard like HTML pages - there's less abandonment which results in higher sales. The use of Flash could prove to be very successful for Goodstorm.

I've got another popular company that is using Flex for an e-commerce solution today, as a follow up to my previous post about Flexand Flashbased e-commerce sites. The Sony Ericsson website uses a Flex based interface to display and filter cell phones for potential customers.

Filtering results and drilling down into products seems to be a category that developers feel Flex and Flash are really good at. Nike uses a Flash RIA for similar functionality. Not surprising: Flash and Flex applications look really great, with awesome transitions, fades and other subtleties, and can accomplish the task without reloading data or the webpage. This makes for a much improved user experience than a regular HTML website (and we know that improved experiences make for higher conversion rates).

One of the things that I don't like about the Sony store is the fact that a dialog window pops up when they filter results. The checkbox to "Don't show this dialog again" doesn't seem to work for me, so it keeps popping up over and over again. I also don't like the fact that the Read More link from a phone takes me to an HTML page, because when I hit the back button I'm not sent to the exact screen that I was at before. I'm at the main store page, not the specific phone page I was at. (This could be fixed by changing the URL when I click on an item in the store, like Yahoo does with Maps).

E-commerce is a primary example of where a truly rich Internet application makes sense. An improved customer experience that occurs with the use of an RIA typically results in higher checkout numbers - in terms of the amount that people buy and the number of people who successfully checkout.

Here are a few examples of rich Internet application e-commerce sites that I think have done things right. The first is a large company. Very large. Nike has recently redone their nikestore.com website to feature a Flash based online store, complete with product searching, shopping carts and checkout. All in one easy to use, visually appealing website.