Dunelm enhances its e-commerce platform

 As advanced in a previous article, in 2016 Dunelm acquired the e-commerce company Worldstores and brought in specialists to start working on its own online shopping site. It wanted to introduce more features and enhance its digital offerings.

To build the new platform, the firm leveraged serverless technologies to replace its on-premise product with a cloud-based architecture on Amazon Web Services. Thanks to this, the website is a lot faster and it now has a ‘search’ function with a much quicker load time. This process was completed in October 2019. Six months later, the retailer decided to change its CDN so that it is in accordance with its new infrastructure-as-a-code strategy. To do this, it tested out edge cloud provider Fastly's programmable CDN and found improvements with regards to speed on selected web pages. Thus, it opted for the software.

Since the introduction of the revamped platform, Dunelm can make 40-50 releases per week. There are also considerable enhancements regarding basket, checkout, search, or product pages. Because of this speed, engineers are given greater flexibility. This means that they are able to take strategic decisions swiftly. For instance, purging the retailer’s cache previously took 15 minutes to one hour. Now, this can be done in less than half a second.

The load time is faster now © Royalty-free image


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