This case study details the mobile point-of-sale (MPOS) work Mindera carried out as part of our collaboration with Dunelm, one of the UK’s biggest home furnishing retailers.

Overview

• Client: Dunelm
• Industry: Retail and Distribution
• Project type: mobile development
• Tech used:
  • Node.js & Express
  • React / Next.js
  • GraphQL & Microservices
  • AWS
    

About Dunelm

Dunelm’s story begins in 1979, when Bill and Jean Adderly took a stall at a Leicester market to sell curtains and slippers.

The Adderley’s market stall success led them to open their first bricks and mortar store in Leicester, called Dunelm, in 1984. This was followed by Dunelm’s first superstore in 1991, which was opened in Rotherham.

Fast forward to 2021. Dunelm is now a public company with 172 physical stores and a busy ecommerce website. The business had an annual turnover of £1.3 billion GBP, making it one of the largest home furnishing retailers in the UK.

Dunelm has firmly established its business as a household name in the UK, with a strong proposition of products.

Executive summary

Mindera collaborated with Dunelm to give it the control to innovate its MPOS solution.

The project was a true partnership, with the teams being a 50/50 mix of people from Dunelm and our Minders. The result is a new mobile sales offering that outperforms its predecessor by over 135%.

Challenges

Dunelm’s retail stores are of the size commonly found in UK retail parks.

Not having the physical space of some of their competitors’ massive warehouse-style outlets, Dunelm struggled to make customers aware of the wide range of lines that could not possibly fit in-store but are available online.

For example, customers often thought that if there was a three-seat sofa in store in a particular design then they couldn’t get a two or four-seater version. Something that wasn’t the case.

To counter this problem, Dunelm sought to introduce an MPOS. This lead to two challenges:

• First: introducing an MPOS
• Second: innovating its MPOS
  

Below, we explain these two challenges in greater detail.

Introducing an MPOS

Dunelm introduced an MPOS solution that used third-party software running on tablets.

This meant in-store ‘hosts’ could advise customers on the extended range and capture sales there and then. Payment could be taken using a connected pin-entry device, booking delivery at the same time.

This solution was successful in terms of sales, adding millions to Dunelm’s in-store revenue. However, as the business innovated, MPOS was being left behind.

As a native iOS application, any changes to purchase journeys or new offerings couldn’t be easily integrated into the system. Changes to the software required planning, agreement, development, and implementation. In other words, a waterfall approach was hurting innovation.

This presented a second MPOS challenge to Dunelm: getting control over its own MPOS solution, so it would be able to get the most from its development and deployment capacities and to keep pace with the innovation of the business.

Innovating its MPOS

It was proposed that Dunelm’s existing website could be the face of a revised MPOS solution. The reason for this is that any updates and enhancements to the principle website would be inherited ‘for free’ by the MPOS terminals, which now numbered nearly 600 across the stores.

It was agreed that a proof of concept would be undertaken to see if this was possible. However, Dunelm needed a fast turnaround to avoid forthcoming and, potentially, expensive contract negotiations with its existing supplier.

Dunelm reached out to Mindera to see if we could work together to prove that both the website and the MPOS system could share a unified code base.

Solutions

It was agreed this would be a three-month project with a single goal: to prove that in-store hosts could use Dunelm’s own website to make sales using the existing tablets and card readers.

In other words, is it possible and secure to control in-store payment devices from a website?

Over the course of three months, a solution was built equally between Dunelm’s experts and Mindera’s specialists. This solution not only proved the concept but also demonstrated that no infrastructure changes would be required and all existing equipment could be used, a factor that reduced complexity and financial commitment exponentially.

The solution included the following elements:

• Knowledge transfer & continuation of best practice
• A new iOS app was created
• Adopting a lean software development philosophy
• Using agile processes for developing & testing
  

Underneath, we outline what each of these elements involved.

Knowledge transfer & continuation of best practice

Dunelm’s executive committed to replacing the existing infrastructure with the new solution.

Mindera were invited to create a new crew working in Dunelm’s digital department. The crew worked as a blended team of engineers from both companies. This was to ensure a successful knowledge transfer and the continuation of best practice.

In September 2020, the crew set to work — despite being under difficult lockdown conditions.

A new iOS app was created

Over the next few months, Dunelm and Mindera worked together to ensure two things:

• That hosts would have all the advantages customers purchasing directly could access on the Dunelm website
• That the in-store payment systems would work seamlessly with the website
  

A new iOS app was created that ‘hosted’ the website. This created an integration point between the cloud-based website and the in-store payment systems.

Best-practice patterns were used to ensure that maintainable, pragmatic code was created. Most of all, security was considered ‘left-first’ to make sure Dunelm’s customers were safe and able to confidently buy products using MPOS.

Adopting a lean software development philosophy

To get to the outcomes Dunelm needed, we employed the philosophy of lean software development. Two-week sprints with full ceremonies ensured that stakeholders were always well informed and had the chance to share their feedback with us.

This approach avoided many problems later on in the development cycle. For example, the realisation that we needed to know the date-of-birth of the host was captured early enough in the process to be part of the authorisation system from the start. The reason for this was to ensure no-one underage was sold a restricted item — like a knife.

Using agile processes for developing & testing

Developing and testing the new solution turned out to be the largest challenge of the project.

Faced with a COVID-19 lockdown, the hybrid crew had little access to current equipment and no ability to see the incumbent solution in action or talk to its users. Worst of all, the crew was unable to meet in person.

To counter this, Dunelm and Mindera worked together to use agile processes to their full advantage.

By ensuring the team knew what was needed and why it was needed, with a clear view of the business value, they were motivated to work through these difficult conditions. We ensured the crew’s voices were heard and we incorporated their feedback into our planning.

Results

When it looked as if Dunelm stores would re-open in early April 2021, the new solution was ready and waiting.

The slightly earlier opening of Scottish stores afforded us a short pilot run where the solution was demonstrated to work as expected, despite never having been run in a ‘real’ store before.

With confidence, we used the pipelines we had built to deploy the new solution to in-store servers and tablets across all 170+ stores.

These are the results Dunelm saw from the project:

• First day MPOS sales of £150,000
• Outperforming the previous MPOS by 135%
• New MPOS accounts for over 3% of in-store sales
  
  

In the following sections, we cover each of these results in more detail.

First day MPOS sales of £150,000

On April 12th 2021, the remainder of the UK opened for business. The new MPOS solution took in excess of £150,000 on its first day, smashing all expectations.

Outperforming the previous MPOS by 135%

At time of writing, Dunelm has seen the new MPOS solution outperform its predecessor by around 135%.

New MPOS accounts for over 3% of in-store sales

The new MPOS solution is so successful that, at the time of writing, it accounts for over 3% of in-store sales. This is well above predictions for the solution.

Client’s words

After two weeks of the new MPOS offering being in place, the Dunelm principal engineer overseeing the project described it as “the smoothest rollout of a new technology Dunelm have ever seen.”

Looking for a tech partner? Get in touch!

Dunelm is one of many companies Mindera has collaborated with to deliver robust solutions to key business challenges. If you require a tech partner for your business then visit our services page to discover what we offer. We’d love to help your company achieve its goals.