DUNELM GROWS MULTICHANNEL REVENUE.
Dunelm the UK's leading homewares retailer currently has 140 super stores alongside their online store Dunelm.com. The group’s proposition is ‘simply value for money’ and their aim is to match choice and value with availability and good customer service.
Dunelm started life as a ready-made curtain market stall business in 1979, its first shop opened in Leicester in 1984 and the first Dunelm superstore opened in 1991, selling a broader range of home-wares. Dunelm listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2006 and includes the Dorma brand (Dorma.co.uk).
Today the superstores carry a range of more than 20,000 products, from home textiles to kitchenware, dining, furniture, rugs and lighting.
Dunelm’s goal was to increase the contribution of online sales and the website’s conversion rates. To achieve this they intended to extend the online range, improve the delivery proposition and develop the reserve and collect service. With most multichannel transactions seeing the order being placed online and delivered direct to home, the retailer wanted more convenient delivery options, and to boost its fulfillment capacity.
We have worked on a number of projects to help Dunelm increase customer engagement, introduce new customer touch points and grow multichannel participation.
We switched Dunelm from their in-house system to an IBM WebSphere Commerce Enterprise solution, following which Dunelm's website fast became their number one "store", measured by sales. We enhanced the checkout, mega menus, SEO, merchandising zones and implemented ratings and reviews. We improved reserve and collect, with the introduction of a single view of stock, reduced lead times to 3 hours from order to collections, enabling customers to check availability in local stores and reserve for purchase. We also enabled next-day delivery and introduced tagging for web analytics, a new CMS and helped to launch both tablet and mobile-optimised versions of Dunelm's website, which led to 15% of online visits coming via smartphones.
Additionally, we’ve also provided application support, performance and capacity planning services.
Together we’ve changed the way customers shop at Dunelm for the better. Most of the retailer’s shopping journeys now involve some element of online activity; whether that’s browsing, research or the final purchase.
By 2013 more than a third of overall customer visits were coming through the website, with multichannel sales now over 6% of the business. In the financial year 2013/14, multichannel revenues increased by 60% and operating profits were up by 8.9%.
Dunelm continues to make market share gains and remains market leader with 7.4% of UK homewares market.
"Over the years we have being working with Salmon, we have made good progress in growing our multichannel revenues. Salmon have provided great expertise in project delivery and application support which has helped us achieve our online objectives. Their flexibility to support our trading fluctuations and peak events to a high SLA, whilst providing genuine pro-active improvement stands out. They have worked with us as real partners to help us achieve our success to date."
- Chris Shaw, CIO, Dunelm