John Lewis began trading over 150 years ago and have become one of Britain’s most well-known department stores. But today, the retailer finds itself in a rapidly evolving market, like so many of their competitors. How can today’s retailers rise to the challenge, meet customer expectations, and continue growing?
AMBITION
Unleashing John Lewis’ eCommerce potential
John Lewis’ underlying eCommerce platform was restricting their ability to deliver critical change into their digital channels. The platform didn’t allow them to keep up with competitors or deliver world-class digital experiences for customers. They wanted to become more agile, innovative, and create digital experiences that would grow their customer base and build loyalty.
ACTION
Seamlessly transitioning to a new tech platform.
Digital transformation in retail is more than eCommerce apps and websites. It’s about infusing technology into every single part of a business. Working together with John Lewis, Google, and Equal Experts, we formed a 150+ strong team focused on delivering a new, modern, and market-leading eCommerce platform.
The new platform we created was cloud-native, based on a composable architecture and included commerce tools for the core capability to capture new orders. We worked collaboratively to provide the architecture and engineering expertise needed to build and deliver this service. Our senior delivery leadership oversaw its delivery, and cutover, which was completed with no impact to customers who could continue placing orders, and as a result had no impact on business performance and John Lewis’ revenue.
We used Deloitte’s KIT technology to develop a new app for John Lewis’ partners so they could provide a better service experience in-store, by helping customers browse the full range of products and taking their orders, delivering to a location of their choice.
ACHIEVEMENT
A flagship retailer ready for a digitised world
Our collective efforts resulted in us creating a composable, cloud-native eCommerce platform from the ground up. This has enabled John Lewis to significantly increase the frequency with which they can deliver new change. The retailer has now moved from 10 deployments a year to over 15,000 deployments per year.
For the business, this has resulted in shorter timeframes in taking new propositions to customers, maintaining the great service experience that customers have come to expect from John Lewis.
The platform’s underlying technology brought about a number of changes such as new payment options, an enhanced pre-order capability, and a new customer-facing app for John Lewis’ partners to use in stores. The app is helping them better serve customers on the shop floor, while boosting the mobile share of online sales, which have seen an increase in in-app revenue of 205% since 2019.
increase in ecommerce platform deployments per year
in-app revenue increase since 2019
By combining our engineering and architecture expertise with senior delivery leadership and a culture of working closely with our clients, we modernised John Lewis' eCommerce platform, helping them to deliver digital experiences that delight their customers and grow their business.
