May 2022: Product Releases
fabric’s Product Release Blog highlights some of the recent product releases and enhancements we’ve made so you can stay up to date on what’s new. This May edition covers updates for the following products:
Experience Manager (XM)
If you’re a merchandiser, marketer, or CMO, you understand the importance of modern, differentiated, and consistent experiences across all of your customer’s touchpoints — and having the right tools to make delivering them as easy as possible. As a developer, you’re keenly aware of the complexity and pressures that go along with this. Enter fabric XM — a flexible, frontend-agnostic CMS for creating, managing, and optimizing content across all channels that is equally as “user-friendly” for marketers as it is for developers.
This month, the fabric XM team shipped a series of improvements to make managing content across multiple customer touchpoints easier and more streamlined.
Multi-channel management
fabric XM makes it easy to simultaneously manage content across various sales channels and devices, including web stores, mobile apps, or in-store kiosks. You can easily configure new channels for any of the following use cases:
- Distinct brands: Retailers often have multiple brands aimed at specific target segments. Create a channel for each brand to maintain a consistent (or distinct) look, feel, and tone.
- Focused product category sites: Use channels for an experience focused on a specific product category (such as a site that only merchandises plumbing products for a home improvement retailer).
- Location: Leverage channels to deliver distinct experiences to particular locations. These can be different regions, such as separate sites for the US and Canada. Or base them on physical stores to customize content needs for individual stores or geographic locations
- Devices: You can set up unique channels for specific devices, such as a mobile app or desktop. Content can be optimized to the specific form factor and experience you want for app users.
Once configured, channels are added across all of the core XM modules — Menus, Pages, and Global Elements — making it easier to deliver content across any combination of channels from a single UI.
Multi-channel preview
This month, the XM team introduced multi-channel preview, a feature that lets you preview content across your different channels quickly and in real-time. When a page or global element is assigned to more than one channel, simply use the dropdown tool to preview how your content will look on those channels. This means you won’t have to switch instances, open a new webpage, or open up a different tool to manage content on another sales channel — what a relief!
XM DAM integration
Rich assets are essential to creating engaging customer experiences. Managing and organizing these assets effectively is therefore crucial. Now, fabric XM comes out of the box with an integrated Digital Asset Manager (DAM) to streamline content authoring and improve operational efficiency for your frontend teams. The DAM serves as a central library of assets, removing content silos within each department, redundant storage, and inefficient workflows. This latest release offers many benefits to our XM customers:
- Embed assets directly into XM components using the Copilot UI
- Easily manage users, organization, taxonomy, and assets
- Support for all major asset file types for images, videos, and documents
- A fast, global CDN for easy embedding and optimal performance
fabric Dropship
To put things simply, offering new products to your customers is costly, time-consuming, and risky. With fabric Dropship, we provide the services and technology to easily curate and sell high-quality, direct-ship-to-consumer assortment without the constraints or risks of traditional fulfillment. Regardless of the assortment strategy — whether it be cross-merchandising, collecting sales data to influence traditional fulfillment, or offering substitute products to curb out-of-stock rates when supply chains are increasingly unreliable — fabric Dropship is the complete solution for seamlessly integrating dropship into your business.
This month, the Dropship team unveiled new features that help retailers scale their dropshipping programs quickly and efficiently.
New supplier onboarding
A successful dropshipping program has two requirements: It can scale easily and has knowledgeable/capable supplier partners. With our newly launched supplier onboarding, we’re happy to deliver the following:
- One-click invitations: Inviting a new supplier is as easy as entering a name and email address. When you invite a new supplier, they will receive a customized invitation to connect accompanied by an easy-to-follow, fully self-service workflow to get them up and running quickly.
- Vendor Support: We’re very excited to introduce the fabric Dropship Vendor Support team! This team is dedicated to training, onboarding, and offering continuous support to ensure that vendors are empowered and well equipped to provide their retailers with the best possible experience and products. In addition, our support team helps with initial setup, product upload & validation, and testing & verifying integrations so that your vendors can launch as quickly as possible.
Connection events calendar
An easy and efficient onboarding process is critical to a successful dropshipping program. In addition to our streamlined onboarding process, we’ve introduced a new feature to help you organize and track important upcoming events related to your suppliers. The connection events calendar offers a monthly view of upcoming vendor launch dates and lets you quickly navigate to your specific settings and review onboarding progress related to each of your suppliers.
Offers
If you’re a merchandiser, developer, or your company’s head of digital, you understand the pains of managing your pricing strategies with spreadsheets and outdated tech. You’re not alone. With fabric Offers, we provide you the tools to create and manage highly configurable pricing and promotion strategies efficiently and reliably. This month, the fabric Offers team released a new promotion category to further help you attract and retain customers.
Buy X Get Y promotions
Buy X Get Y promotions allow you to discount products based on a purchase of another product or bundle of products. The most common uses are for “Buy one get one” promotions. However, the possibilities are endless as Buy X Get Y promotions can support an unlimited number of products.
Buy X Get Y promotions can be created easily using several different criteria:
- Customer buys
- SKUs – This option allows you to search/ browse products and categories or bulk upload a list of products that a customer must purchase to qualify for the promotion.
- Bundles – This option allows you to choose multiple sets of SKUs. A customer must purchase the required quantity from all SKU sets to qualify.
- Customer gets
- SKU – This option lets you select specific SKUs to be discounted. You can also specify if you would like to offer an item for free.
- Cart – This option allows you to discount the total cart value by a fixed amount or a percentage.
- Max quantity – For either SKU or Cart promotions, set the maximum number of SKUs the discount applies to.
Enhanced fabric Search
Today, many retailers and B2B companies running legacy platforms have a problem with syncing search indexing and site experience. So why should they care? Well, efficient search indexing is critical to having accurate product, price, and inventory information throughout the whole e-commerce sales funnel. Imagine a customer searches for a product and sees that it’s in stock, only to later find out that the product is out of stock at checkout. Even the world’s most prominent brands are losing customers due to this frustration.
This month, fabric’s Search team made several improvements to our search capabilities, resulting in an 8X improvement in indexing speed and uncapped customer configurations for sync schedule; the net results are greater site accuracy and fewer OOS (Out of Stocks).
Product marketing @ fabric. Previously @ Accenture and Infosys.
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