Custom eCommerce Solutions from Objectware, Inc.

Challenge: Lost shopping carts, lost market share

Fabric.com, the world’s leading online fabric store, had been selling online to consumers for six years and its off-the-shelf shopping cart application had begun to interfere with the store’s growth. Sales were declining, the business was losing revenue, and Stephen Friedman, the company’s CEO, knew the company needed fundamental changes in order to get the business back on the right track.

Fabric’s previous e-commerce application was inflexible and offered limited reporting functions. When customers abandoned their shopping carts, there was no way to find out why or to reach out to them. The application’s limited promotions and coupons feature offered few options for Fabric to reward its loyal customer base. In addition, since the application was based on pre-packaged ecommerce software, Fabric was locked into a site that many of its competitors also used, limiting its ability to differentiate itself from the competition. Fabric’s old site was not search-engine friendly, which meant critical search engine traffic could never find its way to their unique product offerings. The company was losing customers – and market share.

Solution: Custom-built site, designed to delight the customer

Friedman took a big chance on a major project to revolutionize his company. He hired Objectware to re-invent Fabric’s ecommerce presence, a big gamble, but one that promised big rewards if it was done right. Friedman shot for the moon, challenging Objectware to design a site that would satisfy every one of Fabric’s online sales and business needs.

The new website has revolutionized Fabric.com’s consumers’ shopping experience. It’s easy to navigate throughout the site and new visitors are guided to special features and offerings – the new site has succeeded in keeping customers coming back again and again. The site delivers:

• Satisfaction guarantee and effective customer service function
• Loyalty program that encourages frequent shoppers to earn points that can be redeemed against future purchases
• Enticing and exciting promotions and electronic coupon programs
• Customer account management which allows easy management of personal profile, available coupons, order history and personal preferences

The new site is search engine optimized and regularly shows up on the first page of search results on popular engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

On the back end, the system integrates Fabric’s Inventory Management, Purchasing, Fulfillment, Merchandising and Customer Service departments to provide robust end-to-end ERP support. A workflow engine is also incorporated to assist the company in running day-to-day tasks and labor intensive processes.

Results:Sales are up 35% and traffic has doubled – in only four months.

Friedman and Fabric.com win big: Sales are up 35% and traffic has doubled – in only four months. The new site attracts visitors and keeps them, and, through automation of the back end, growth can be fully supported with existing staff, eliminating the need to incur additional labor to support the growing demand.

Objectware’s solution resulted in a customer-friendly site, and – combined with its search-engine-friendly platform – the site has generated substantial results for Fabric.com. Sales are up, traffic has doubled – and the site’s back-end dashboard and workflow engine enables management to make well-informed decisions with up-to-the-minute data. This has allowed quicker resolution of trouble tickets, inventory fulfillment and other operational anomalies – before they can surface and negatively impact sales. Fabric.com’s growth potential now is virtually unlimited. The company is ready to take on the business-to-business market and has contracted Objectware to create a similarly successful site.