Fabric Commerce: Platform Powering Retail Innovation and Agility

Discover how Fabric Commerce is revolutionizing retail. A platform that empowers businesses to adapt quickly, enhance customer experiences, and drive growth.

Fabric Commerce

Type

E-commerce

Founded

2017

Website

fabric.inc

Technology / Fabric Commerce: Platform Powering Retail Innovati

Fabric is an ecommerce technology company on the cutting edge of composable and headless commerce.

Founded in 2017 by former Amazon leaders, Fabric has quickly emerged as a next-generation commerce platform well-positioned to serve the needs of modern brands.

Fabric is an API-driven systems that empower retailer agility and developer velocity.

Key Highlights

  • Fabric is a leading provider of headless, composable commerce solutions
  • Key benefits of Fabric's platform 
  • Core capabilities of the platform
  • Supports integration via headless commerce or gradual migration from legacy systems
  • Supports retailers with innovations in areas like AI and global expansion

Introduction to Fabric Commerce

Fabric is an ecommerce technology company at the forefront of headless and composable commerce solutions.


Unlike traditional monolithic platforms, Fabric offers a flexible set of modular services that allow retailers to incrementally upgrade systems without the need for complex re-platforming projects.

Image: Dashboard of Fabric Commerce
Source: Pinterest

Overview of Headless Commerce

The core promise of headless commerce is decoupling the front-end experience layer from back-end services like order management, inventory, pricing, and more. 

This is achieved through well-documented APIs that make it easy to swap out components as business needs evolve. 

The "composable" nature of Fabric's offering means retailers can mix and match solutions instead of being locked into a single vendor's stack.

Fabric's founding team & funding

Fabric was founded in 2017 by former Amazon leaders including CEO Faisal Masud, CTO Umer Sadiq, and Chief Evangelist Ryan Bartley. 

The founding team consisted of seasoned ecommerce executives determined to leverage their expertise to create the next generation of retail infrastructure.

To date, Fabric has raised an impressive 293 million in funding, demonstrating that investors strongly believe in the company's vision.

This includes a recent 140 million Series C round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2. Fabric is now valued at over $1.5 billion, cementing its status as a unicorn startup.

With substantial financial backing and an executive team packing decades of domain experience, Fabric has quickly emerged as a commerce disruptor ready to challenge established players. 

Its cloud-native platform, developer-friendly APIs, and modular architecture offer a glimpse into the future of composable retail systems.

Key Benefits of the Fabric Commerce Platform

Fabric's composable architecture and headless approach unlock a range of benefits that give brands an edge in meeting rising consumer expectations around digital experiences. Let's explore five of the most compelling advantages.

Flexibility & modularity

Firstly, Fabric delivers unmatched flexibility and modularity. Instead of a rigid commerce suite, brands get fine-grained building blocks to incrementally craft the right stack.

As needs grow or shift, components can be swapped in or out thanks to API-based microservices .


This agility means retailers avoid risky replatforming projects. Modularity also enables omnichannel initiatives by breaking channel silos.

Developer-friendly

Secondly, Fabric is extremely developer-friendly and extensible. 

API-first services with stellar documentation empower engineering teams to quickly integrate, customize, and innovate on top of Fabric's commerce engines. 

Because headless separates front and back-ends, developers gain increased freedom over front-end tech without disrupting the core platform.

Omnichannel retail capabilities

Fabric offers strong omnichannel and unified commerce capabilities out of the box. 

Critical functionality like inventory visibility, order management, customer profiles, and fulfillment is converged across channels for seamless shopping journeys. 

Fabric also provides mobile SDKs to build high-performance native apps.

Fast time to market

Brands leveraging Fabric can achieve rapid time-to-value. 

The middleware nature of headless environments coupled with Fabric's cloud-native architecture means faster implementation compared to legacy suites. 

This allows retailers to get to market quickly with new initiatives.

Scalability & stability

Lastly, Fabric's platform offers battle-tested scalability and stability to support business growth. 

The system gracefully handles traffic spikes thanks to the elasticity of cloud infrastructure. Enhanced security and compliance coverage also provide peace of mind.

Image: Key Benefits of Fabric Commerce Platform
 

Core Capabilities and Features

Fabric Commerce Cloud provides a robust set of services across major commerce domains to fuel digital business growth. 

Modular engines handle critical functionality like order orchestration, inventory visibility, merchandising, and more. 

Let's explore some of the platform's most powerful capabilities.

Composable Architecture

At the heart of Fabric's infrastructure is a cutting-edge composable architecture featuring:

Microservices: Fabric breaks down monoliths into standalone microservices that enable greater resilience and flexibility. Granular business capabilities become modular building blocks.

Cloud-Native: All products leverage cloud-first designs optimized for scalability, elasticity, and availability. Fabric maintains multi-cloud portability across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

API-First: Cleanly defined APIs drive loose coupling between microservices and external systems. This enables seamless integration and customization.

Order Management & Inventory

Fabric OMS provides robust, real-time order lifecycle management and inventory tracking across channels with:

Unified Commerce: Single pipeline inmates, fulfillment, and inventory data converged across physical and digital touchpoints.

Subscription Billing: Flexible recurring order capabilities including scheduled deliveries, consolidated payments, and subscription management.

Merchandising & Customer Experience

Retailers can better engage customers and optimize purchasing experiences through

Personalized Pricing: Apply advanced dynamic pricing rules matched to customer segments and even individual shopper history.

Dropshipping Integration: Rapidly onboard supplier catalogs to expand product assortment without the overhead of managing additional SKUs.

Mobile Commerce Optimization: Leverage React and Angular SDKs to quickly build high-performance mobile apps with out-of-box Fabric integrations.

Now let's explore how brands can effectively implement Fabric's composable commerce services.

Implementing Fabric Commerce

Fabric offers retailers multiple pathways for onboarding its headless commerce services.

Brands can choose between a pure headless integration or incremental adoption to gradually replace legacy systems.

Integration & Migration Approaches

Headless Implementation: Retailers operating fully decoupled technology stacks can implement Fabric as the backend engine while preserving their customer-facing frontends.

This is achieved by leveraging Fabric's commerce APIs to connect sites, apps, and other touchpoints to microservices handling product data, cart flows, fulfillment, and more.

Legacy Replatforming: For traditional commerce platforms nearing end-of-life, Fabric enables incremental migration of outdated systems. 

Prioritize high-value capabilities like pricing or inventory first.

This reduces risk and the initial scope while delivering ROI through modular upgrades. With each phase, more legacy functionality gets absorbed into Fabric’s cloud-native services.

Customization & Extensibility

While turnkey SaaS solutions offer convenience, they limit the ability to tailor platforms to unique business needs. Fabric unlocks advanced customization through:

Configurability Options: Platform administrators can tweak a wide array of preferences and business rules through the Copilot merchant interface without touching code.

Commerce Customization: For more complex needs, Fabric provides extensibility points to override default logic or inject proprietary capabilities at the microservice level.

Extensibility through APIs: Evergreen REST APIs enable developers to build innovative customer experiences on top of Fabric's commerce engines.

Access real-time data and leverage headless flexibility without disruption.

Fabric's Growth Strategy and Roadmap

Fabric is aggressively expanding its platform capabilities and global footprint. Let's examine some key areas powering Fabric's rise as an ecommerce leader.

Expanding Internationally

While Fabric has seen stellar adoption domestically, international markets represent massive greenfield opportunities as more business goes online.

As part of geographic expansion plans, Fabric is enhancing language and currency localization, integrating regional payment methods, and improving compliance coverage for global commerce.

Expect increased sales and marketing attention abroad.

Enhanced Platform Intelligence

Fabric is investing heavily in machine learning and artificial intelligence to power the next generation of intelligent retail systems.

Key focus areas include predictive inventory planning, dynamic pricing, personalized product recommendations, and automated customer support. 

The ultimate vision is self-tuning commerce operations.

Investment in Innovation

By nurturing strong internal R&D while also fostering partnerships, Fabric aims to rapidly incubate and deploy cutting-edge capabilities to its customer base faster than competitors.

Serverless architectures, IoT commerce, blockchain infrastructure, and conversational interfaces represent early areas of exploration.

Supporting Retail Modernization

Fabric is committed to supporting omnichannel digital transformation through cloud adoption, headless flexibility, and API-based extensibility. 

The company also wants to help retailers reimagine consumer experiences leveraging emerging interaction modes like voice commerce, AR/VR and connected in-store platforms.

By aggressively expanding platform services while accelerating global growth, Fabric plans to dominate modern B2B2C infrastructure much like AWS has with cloud services. 
 

Its strategy centers on empowering retailer agility through composable, API-first systems . Fabric is perfectly positioned to lead platforms into the digital future.

Image: Fabric's Growth Strategy and Roadmap

To Conclude

Fabric Commerce Cloud represents the next evolution of retail infrastructure. 
 

By embracing composable architecture , headless flexibility , and API extensibility , Fabric is empowering brands to rapidly deliver innovation while future-proofing technology investments.

Key Takeaways

  • Fabric offers a modular stack of cloud-native microservices handling critical commerce capabilities. Retailers can mix and match solutions instead of facing monolithic suites.
  • The headless approach decouples front-end presentation from back-end services for greater agility. Developer-friendly APIs make integration intuitive.
  • Key benefits include reduced re-platforming risks, faster time-to-value, and the ability to digitally consolidate siloed channels for unified retail.
  • Fabric is expanding globally while enhancing automation through AI and machine learning . The goal is to not just match, but lead platforms in capability innovation.

Fabric's Vision

At its core, Fabric is determined to eradicate the notion that brands must choose between leveraging modern innovations and preserving existing technology investments.

The company's vision for open, connected composable commerce will empower retailers to adopt cutting-edge engagement models while maximizing the lifespan of working systems.

Rather than ripping out legacy infrastructure, Fabric promotes incremental adoption aligned with business priorities.

As more capabilities shift to the platform over time, systems grow increasingly future-proof thanks to cloud-native designs.

As more capabilities shift to the platform over time, systems grow increasingly future-proof thanks to cloud-native designs .


By striking the right balance between state-of-the-art functionality and pragmatic flexibility, Fabric aspires to serve as the commerce backbone for the world's premiere omnichannel brands.

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