SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Algolia, a leading provider of an API Platform for Dynamic Experiences, today announced that the UK’s leading homewares retailer, Dunelm, selected Algolia to deliver a more personalized and relevant online customer service on their digital properties. As a result, Dunelm increased its search relevance resulting in increased conversions, doubled site traffic, and more than doubled its online revenue. Algolia’s relevant, fast and personalized search is a key part of Dunelm’s new digital transformation initiative. The Algolia-powered online experience mirrors Dunelm’s physical store experience, delivering a welcoming digital “shop window” for customers.
“We were able to improve our customer experience, double online sales, and significantly improve conversion rates by leveraging Algolia’s best-in-class search engine, transparent search ranking and rules, and pre-built UI libraries,” said James Hoare, Chief Technology Officer, Dunelm. “This, combined with our overall digital transformation strategy, enabled our teams to quickly and easily develop a search experience that met the demand and expectations of our customers.”
A Need for World-Class Search, Browse and Category Navigation
Before implementing Algolia, Dunelm, which has more than 170 stores across the UK, was constrained by its legacy site search features. Basically, the company’s old search was not able to meet the retailer’s business goals, resulting in poor search relevance and consequently underwhelming conversion rates. Dunelm’s legacy site struggled with scalability and performance issues, and the legacy site required extensive, ongoing development support and maintenance resources consequently slowing down their continual improvement. Also, the previous search experience did not meet customers’ ever-increasing expectations nor could the solution easily scale to accommodate an escalating number of online users.
“Today’s consumers expect nothing less than a Google or Amazon-like user search experience -- and today’s businesses are constantly working to meet this high customer experience standard,” said Bernadatte Nixon, Chief Executive Officer, Algolia. “Companies need powerful, intuitive search capabilities for web, mobile and voice applications -- and making these capabilities a reality is no easy task. Algolia’s search API and InstantSearch capabilities were the perfect complement to Dunelm’s online retail efforts. Search APIs enable developers to quickly add powerful search capabilities while business users gain the valuable insights needed to meet and exceed customer expectations. It’s a win-win across the board.”
Dunelm aimed to empower its business through technology with a digital shopping space that customers loved to visit. The retailer turned to Algolia to help it deliver an e-commerce experience that converted window shoppers into revenue-generating buyers. Dunelm’s shift from a monolithic, legacy platform to a cloud-native API platform would enable site visitors to easily discover and locate desired products — before they bounced to a competing site.
Customizable, Transparent API-Based Personalized Recommendations
As part of Dunelm’s new digital strategy, the retailer’s technical team opted for a microservices, headless commerce approach, which decouples the front-end presentation layer from the backend e-commerce system. In 2019, Dunelm selected Algolia over other open source solutions due to Algolia’s customizable API-first platform that gives developers full control and is designed for headless commerce. Also, Dunelm’s digital team needed search technology that could easily integrate with the retailer’s existing AWS back end. Dunelm also cited Algolia’s pre-built capabilities, including indexing, merchandising ranking, rules, and analytics, along with quality documentation and support as deciding factors.
Relevance, Real Results in Record Time
Dunelm, with Algolia, gained search relevance and speed, in-house manageability and the ability to operate at scale. The company reaped the time and cost-saving benefits of its out-of-the-box superior search relevance, low total cost of ownership, and support from the Algolia team. Algolia’s search API and InstantSearch capabilities allowed Dunelm to boost its search conversion relevance rate in less than a month by quickly serving up products that accurately matched site visitors’ intent.
The retail leader increased its search conversion relevance, doubled its web traffic, and more than doubled its online revenue. Meanwhile, Dunelm’s digital team now has a single, streamlined analytics dashboard — a dashboard that offers a single view of the site’s search performance with the ability to easily customize and optimize the site experience. Dunelm next plans to harness the power of personalized search with additional voice features to continually evolve its online digital shop window.
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About Algolia
Algolia provides an API Platform for Dynamic Experiences enabling organizations to predict intent and deliver results. Algolia achieves this with an API-first approach that allows developers and business teams to surface relevant content when wanted – satisfying the demand for instant gratification – and building and optimizing online experiences that enhance online engagement, increase conversion rates, and enrich lifetime value to generate profitable growth. More than 10,000 companies including Under Armour, Lacoste, Birchbox, Stripe, Slack, Medium, and Zendesk rely on Algolia to manage over 1.5 Trillion search queries a year. Algolia is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, Tokyo, New York and Atlanta. To learn more, visit www.algolia.com.
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