New E-Commerce Platform Fabric Targets Retail Brands That Have Outgrown Shopify

E-commerce platform Fabric aims to give mid-market retailers websites that can be updated and … [+] expanded without an army of code-writing engineers.

Retailers, Faisal Masud feels your e-commerce pain. He says he has a solution, a new e-commerce platform called Fabric.

Masud, who earned his e-commerce credits at Amazon

AMZN
, eBay, Groupon, Staples and Google, recently became CEO of Fabric, a startup that is targeting the sweet spot of online sellers who have outgrown Shopify, but don’t want the expense and size of something like Salesforce

CRM
or its subsidiaries.

Fabric, which is based in Bellevue, Wash., emerged from stealth mode today, and announced that it is backed by $9.5 million in seed funding. Fabric has been quietly onboarding retail brands since the beginning of this year, and is now ready to talk about what it is doing.

Its target clientele, Masud said, is “mid-market to small enterprise customers ready to accelerate their growth online.” He defines mid-market to small enterprise as companies with between $5 million to $1 billion in sales.

Among the first brands using the Fabric platform are ABC Carpet and Home, GNC, and BuildDirect.

Fabric, Masud said, was developed to give retailers, and B2B businesses, an e-commerce platform that is easy to update and customize, without requiring an in-house army of engineers, or costly consultants.

“Essentially Fabric is a platform that’s built to take the burden of engineering away from retailers,” Masud said. “Their technology platforms are the single biggest limiting factor that stifles the growth of these retailers.”

Retailers, Masud said, are in effect paying an “e-commerce tax” in the form of licenses, infrastructure, hardware, software fees, and all the employees and contractors writing custom code every time they need to make a change. “Our goal is to unburden them from that.”

One of Fabric’s top selling points, Masud said, is that the company’s leaders know e-commerce and retail, and thus can better understand what retailers need in an e-commerce platform.

Faisal Masud is CEO of Fabric

“I’ve been a merchant, I’ve been an inventory planner, I’ve been a marketer, I’ve done supply chain forward logistics, reverse logistics, and inventory planning,” he said. Ryan Bartley, a Fabric co-founder, and its chief revenue officer, and Luke Shardlow, chief product officer, also have strong e-commerce backgrounds. “It puts us in a unique position” to think like a retailer while creating a technology solution, Masud said.  

Another asset, he said, is that Fabric is a modular platform. Retailers looking to upgrade their existing websites can add the components they need, and the modules are built to work with existing platforms.

Fabric operates on a software-as-a-service, monthly fee basis, and unlike other platform providers doesn’t charge a percentage of sales.

“One of the big challenges retailers have today is when you get to a significant size with some of these platforms, you’re paying an arm and a leg in rev share,” Masud said.

Retailers signing on with Fabric typically come to the platform from Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, or their own home-grown platform, he said.

ABC Carpet and Home, the landmark New York City retailer, was running its website on an outdated version of Magento before switching to Fabric in February. Aaron Rose, who joined ABC as CEO 17 months ago, said improving the brand’s digital competencies and website were among his top priorities when he took the job.

“What I recognized is when you think about the ABC experience in store, that magic didn’t translate historically online,” Rose said.

“We were faced with a choice, do we proceed with a more modern version of Magento, or go with a new platform,” he said.

He reviewed a number of platform options, and chose Fabric. “Their product designers and developers and engineers building the product are coming from some of the best builders and developers of big tech companies, and they’re bringing a lot of capability that historically was only offered in those big business enterprise solutions into the mid-market,” Rose said.

He also liked the flexibility of the platform, and that it will be easy to add components and personalization as ABC expands its digital capabilities. “I’m going to be able to have an abchome.com experience that is truly unique and tailored – over time – to what we know about the visitor, the site user,” he said.

The platform is easy for non-engineers to update, Rose said. “It’s a very intuitive series of interfaces. It doesn’t require the ability to do custom coding,” he said.

With Fabric, abchome.com’s site speed and online engagement increased, and conversion and revenue run rates grew nearly threefold, Rose said.

Fabric’s $9.5 million seed funding round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Sierra Ventures and Expa. Alex Bard, partner and managing director at Redpoint Ventures, and Tim Guleri, managing partner at Sierra Ventures, have joined Fabric’s board of directors.