Fabric
Simplifying Growth with a Modular E-Commerce Platform

By and large, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic along with the ensuing global lockdown and social distancing norm has forced consumers to abandon physical stores. The result? Online retailers are now seeing ‘Black Friday’-like sales in response to restrictions of people’s movement. On the other hand, the provisions of safely buying products and services online and getting them delivered quickly—contactless—has now become a greater expectation than ever before.

Amid this ‘Cambrian explosion’ of e-commerce in the global economy, established online sellers are consistently working toward expanding their presence into other channels or re-platforming their online business altogether. At the same time, some companies are exploring e-commerce for the first time. Despite the effort being made, most of the e-commerce platforms are still using old technology infrastructure, making such platforms hard to use, fragmented, inefficient, and costly to maintain. They lack security, reliability, and flexibility because they haven’t evolved to meet the needs of the digital-first economy. At this juncture, Shiv Agarwal—the co-founder and CEO of Fabric—believes that an API-first modular architecture is the skeleton key to meeting a multitude of e-commerce requirements. And this is where Seattle-based Fabric cements its cornerstone. “Our modular e-commerce architecture is built on the DNA of scale, security, high performance, and compliance, and it can be deployed to solve any part of that customer journey,” comments Agarwal.

The CEO highlights, today, retailers should aim at evolving their current e-commerce platforms to something that can adapt with a quickly-changing world. “And our architecture supports precisely that. It is built for handling the scale and the speed, which smaller retail companies lack,” adds Agarwal. Notably, Fabric—the latest player in the e-commerce sector—put over three years of immense thought and hard work for designing the extensible, single-tenant SaaS platform that combines a powerful commerce API engine with intuitive business applications.

The API-first approach of the platform empowers multichannel commerce, whether it is a website, POS, or mobile application. The modular nature, moreover, allows the e-commerce platform to be deployed to solve any setback in the customer journey. With all the building blocks of an entire e-commerce platform available to them, users can specifically choose the functionalities they want to use. For example, users can selectively use the Digital Experience Platform or the analytics tool within the Fabric platform based on their specific business requirements. Additionally, users can deploy these necessary solutions in a matter of weeks instead of months that other platforms take.

Highlighting the prowess of the all-round platform, Agarwal shares the story of a large retailer that recently leveraged the Fabric platform to replace its existing system. The client was running old legacy architecture and burning millions of dollars in terms of hosting costs and license fees. And, for the last three years, they were witnessing downtime during the Thanksgiving holiday. Due to complex licensing rules, the client was unable to add additional servers to avoid any downtime during the heavy online traffic. After onboarding with Fabric, the retailer was able to implement the platform in less than 12 weeks. The new architecture helped the client to mitigate downtimes during the peak seasons of sales. Also, it helped them get out of their legacy platform thereby saving millions of dollars. With the new platform, the client could release new features faster through the API platform and perform A/B tests multiple times a week. Additionally, Fabric helped them redesign their old website to create a new and modern user experience.

With such success stories under its hood, Fabric is now looking to add more capabilities. The company is also looking to add a layer of machine intelligence to help businesses grow faster. The next stage for fabric now is to actively help retailers, brands, manufacturers, and their CIOs in getting the right technology stack. “That’s what the Fabric platform is built for; and we’ll continue to build this new e-commerce fabric of the internet,” concludes Agarwal.