One of the UK’s largest home furnishings retailers, Dunelm has 169 superstores, three high street stores and 100 coffee shops across the country. In 2019, the London Stock Exchange revealed that it brought in revenues of £1.1bn.
Like many companies, the merchant has built up an e-commerce presence over the years.
Initially, it used WebSphere, an off-the-shelf platform to design this service
and this allowed it to quickly expand its business. Moreover, it had a Content
Delivery Network (CDN) from Akamai's Instart Logic. Both of these
technologies were very successful until 2017, when Dunelm decided that they
were not fit for the future. According to Tom Hayman, the retailer’s head of
platform, “It was difficult to scale and make changes quickly, and we couldn't
add new features to the platform. To make a change we would do one or two
releases per month, and it was always a very difficult process”.
Dunelm made things work with this system because they did
not have the expertise to build an online shopping website themselves before. However,
in 2016, the firm acquired the e-commerce company Worldstores
for £8.5m. Along with the latter’s experts and additional specialists, the
retailer started developing its own platform that is equipped with several new
features and improvements.
Dunelm has built its own website © Royalty-free image
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