This interview is with Jay Soni, Founder and CEO at Yorkshire Fabric Shop.

Jay Soni, Founder and CEO, Yorkshire Fabric Shop

Jay, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an expert in ecommerce?

I’m Jay, and I founded Yorkshire Fabric Shop and Create Fabrics. Both are dedicated to selling high-quality furnishing and upholstery fabrics to both trade professionals and individual customers. We’ve even had the honor of working with big names like Warner Brothers Studio and the Dorchester Hotels, which has been a fantastic experience. I’ve spent over 15 years in the textiles and furniture industry, and I’ve also worked in the digital realm. This mix of experiences has helped me build solid relationships with suppliers all around the globe and craft brands known for their commitment to quality, customer care, and, above all, an obsession with customer satisfaction. Yorkshire Fabric Shop is our direct-to-customer arm, where we offer more than 6,000 different fabrics and provide custom, made-to-measure services. We’re based in North West England, and we have a hangar display where customers can come and see the variety and quality of our products in person. My journey to becoming an e-commerce expert has been driven by my passion for delivering the best possible products and services to our customers.

What are some of the biggest milestones you've encountered throughout your career in ecommerce?

We had our first major accomplishment in building and launching our own custom fabric-design tool online. This tool allowed users to customize upholstery and curtain fabric right on our site, mixing and matching colors and patterns to their own preferences. It reshaped customer relationships and customer satisfaction by shifting creativity back into the hands of the consumer, who felt more vested in the final product. The tool had a dramatic impact on our online sales and retention levels and represented a revolutionary evolution in our approach to our customers. It was another milestone when we brought in an AI-driven analytics system to manage our inventory and logistics. It employs predictive analytics to forecast demand, which can come from a variety of sources, ranging from seasonal variations, past sales, and even economic statistics. We aligned our inventory better with the predicted demand and have saved a ton of overhead as well as streamlined our supply chain. This not only strengthened our bottom line but also gave us a better position to provide our customers with fast and reliable service while building our brand as one of the best places for upholstery and furnishings fabrics. These achievements are not only signs of big wins but also speak volumes about our passion for innovation and e-commerce customer experience.

You've previously mentioned the success of using a 'sample-to-sale' program to bridge the gap between online and in-person shopping. Can you elaborate on any challenges you faced while implementing this program and how you overcame them?

This 'sample-to-sale' process we introduced at Yorkshire Fabric Shop in order to combine the convenience of online shopping with the tactile sense of going into the store was a huge undertaking with its own set of challenges. One of the challenges was to ship tiny fabric samples quickly and cheaply. Customers liked the convenience of having the fabric on hand before ordering a huge quantity, but to cope with hundreds of tiny samples, they needed a system. We were initially dealing with delays and tracking problems that resulted in customer complaints. For those problems, we invested in a dedicated inventory-management system for smaller items such as fabric samples. This tool was seamlessly integrated with our current online system, which enabled us to follow every sample from our warehouse to the customer’s doorstep with accuracy. We also have a customer-feedback loop, wherein customers can easily file a complaint about their samples by going straight to our website. With the front-end solution to the logistical challenges and by optimizing the process based on customer feedback, we streamlined the sampling process and made it easier for our customers to move from sampling to purchase. This did more than increase customer service; it also greatly raised our sample-to-full-fabric sales.

Many businesses struggle with maintaining a consistent brand experience across both online and offline channels. From your experience, what advice would you give to these businesses based on your 'sample-to-sale' program?

One thing that I’d tell all the companies that have been struggling to create a consistent brand experience both online and offline would be to ensure seamless integration of service touchpoints. For example, in our program, whether a customer is visiting our site or shopping in our store, the same personal service is provided from the free fabric samples to the arrival of their product. That is important because consistency is the key to our brand promise of high-quality and customer care across all channels. In order to do so, we designed a complete system that keeps track of customer interactions and preferences across all channels. With a central CRM platform, we ensure that all of our team can provide timely, informed, and personalized service no matter how the customer chooses to interact with us. With this architecture, we’re able to deliver high-quality personalization and service, which is sometimes difficult when you’re on multiple platforms. Technology integration and consistent customer engagement are the key.

Shifting gears to online strategies, you've highlighted the importance of high-quality visuals and personalized recommendations for boosting conversions. How do you see the role of these strategies evolving as technology advances, particularly with the rise of augmented reality and AI-powered personalization?

Good-looking graphics and custom recommendations have always been the cornerstones of customer experience and conversion optimization in the evolving online retail environment. The future brings AR- and AI-based personalization, which will revolutionize these approaches. AR can change customers' vision of fabrics, for example, enabling them to experience what textures and patterns would look like on their furniture or in their bedroom by way of their smartphones or tablets. Such full-bodied shopping can help to ease the uncertainty that comes with buying high-stakes products such as upholstery fabric online. But more than that, AI will become a personalizer with deeper powers than simply recommending products according to browsing history. Just think: AI algorithms that learn from customer engagement with various content on our website—everything from how long a video has been watched to the type of article they read—personalize the shopping experience in real-time and bring them products tailored to their style and current project. This might mean recommending matching fabrics for a room remodel or new styles matched to items you have already bought.

You've emphasized the need for a seamless checkout process to minimize cart abandonment. What are your thoughts on incorporating alternative payment methods, such as digital wallets or buy now, pay later options, into the checkout experience?

A new e-commerce trend that I think is pretty cool is voice shopping. That can be an effective and increasingly popular strategy with the rise of such AI tools as Amazon Alexa and Google Home. We at Yorkshire Fabric Shop believe this technology has a lot of room for it because our fabrics are more hands-on. Customers might, for example, be able to have their favorite material re-ordered using voice commands or ask for new products without having to log into our website. The tech actually makes the shopping process much more comprehensive for blind people or people with low-tech skills.

With the increasing focus on data privacy, how can ecommerce businesses strike a balance between personalization and respecting customer data?

Alternative payments are an essential feature in modernizing checkout and decreasing cart abandonment. We know that a variety of payment options can be very useful in the shopping experience. For example, by providing digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Wallet, or PayPal, customers can easily pay for their purchases without entering card information manually, which makes transactions fast and safer. These approaches are becoming more the norm than the exception, especially for younger consumers who appreciate speed and convenience. Adding "buy now, pay later" has been particularly effective. This is especially appealing to customers who have a smaller budget for something such as an upholstery project, which can be very large. Because customers can pay over time without interest, we reach a much wider audience, increasing our sales and satisfaction levels. These have received a positive response from our customers since it will help them buy without breaking the bank, which encourages them to spend more.

Looking ahead, what do you believe are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the ecommerce industry in the coming years?

One of the main challenges we are expecting is an increased demand for ultra-speed delivery as well as a demand for sustainable operations. They’re increasingly demanding quicker shipping times, but on top of that, they’ve become more environmentally aware. It will take major logistics and supply-chain innovations to manage these expectations in the right balance.

This would include my company focusing on using better, greener packaging and optimizing delivery processes for lower carbon footprints while continuing to satisfy customers’ demands for speed.

The upside is the growing use of AI and machine learning within e-commerce, which opens massive potential to provide an individualized shopping experience. Even for a smaller company like us, which makes upholstery fabrics and furnishings, harnessing AI to understand customer tastes and propose personalized fabric choices could change the way we communicate with customers.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I’d also love to draw attention to how important it is to be global but also local. When we are developing a digital strategy and putting more resources into e-commerce at Yorkshire Fabric Shop, we also take pride in staying local. This means that we incorporate local products and old-school stylings into our products, which both sets us apart from more mainstream retailers and appeals strongly to customers who are searching for high-quality fabric.