Partnership with home24: driving business growth through seamless tech solutions

About the business

As a leading home and lifestyle e-commerce platform, home24 serves customers across Europe and Brazil. The company offers over 150,000 product items in the 7 European countries where it operates and over 200,000 product items in Latin America. In Brazil, it uses the Mobly brand, and in the DACH region of Europe, the Butlers brand. With a base of 2.1 million active users to date, home24 is a leading player in the industry.

home24 was founded in 2009. Since 2018, it has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. As of the third quarter of 2022, the company was getting 598,000 orders per quarter (about 7,000 orders a day), with an average order value of about €265. All of which gives a sense of the scope and challenges that its e-business model involves.

Our IT experts have been working together with home24’s Shopping Experience Department since 2015, delivering long-term, product-focused solutions.

Business issue and approach

When home24 approached us in 2015, it already had a working e-commerce solution and was looking for further opportunities to grow the business. The founders of home24 chose to go with a dedicated external team of technology experts so that they could focus more fully on business development.

Our dedicated team for home24 includes 6 developers, half of whom are senior experts. The core consists of top professionals with relevant industry and technical expertise and experience on similar projects. Our team has integrated well into home24, becoming an active part of the business across all its activities. 

As the home24 business grew, so did its challenges:

More customers meant a need for more features, which in turn meant a need for more developers to implement those features.

   • As orders multiplied, the next constraint was fulfillment and demand forecasting. home24 chose to migrate to SAP.
   • As mobile web usage grew, developers had to migrate the Frontend to responsive design, a complex and risky change to do all at once. The company had to build up Micro Frontend and React framework competencies and prepare the tools for a gradual (A/B test-driven) migration.
   • Aiming for a much more extensive assortment, onboarding new suppliers internally was no longer practical. So the organization became a marketplace, adding suppliers with ownership of their own fulfillment and product onboarding.
   • With the pandemic and war disrupting the world’s economies, being agile was the only way to survive. The company had to ensure it was optimized and able to change fast, basing all changes on reliable data.

Technological solutions

Our tech team participated in many digital transformation activities. For example: 

We helped add and improve domain features (e.g., integrating payback and external search providers).

   • We were the primary owners of HTTP level proxy (for monolith to micro-service migration via A/B testing, enabling architecture to withstand the switch to the SAP system). This solution was part of a custom-built e-commerce platform.
   • We rewrote the old Frontend to React-based responsive design (including practices like Micro Frontends, modular design system, shadowed traffic for memory leak debugging, and cloud-native mindset).
   • We integrated marketplace functionality (e.g., on the Frontend and API and at the data-synchronization level).

In all our work, we remained flexible, professional, and pragmatic even during unpredictable market situations.

Results

Since 2018, home24 has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the company posted its first group-wide profitable quarter, took over the home accessories expert Butlers, and marked the start of a curated marketplace in Germany on the home24 website.

Our dedicated team has contributed to many more technological solutions and has helped achieve the following milestones:

   • Materializing future-proof microservice architecture (fast MVP via feature toggles, data-driven rollout decisions, extension points at many levels, BlackFriday tested)
   • Finalizing gradual migration from fixed-size to responsive and consistent cross-device experience (desktop, mobile web, and native mobile apps)
   • Speedily adapting functionality in unprecedented market situations (Covid-19, the war in Ukraine)

Partner feedback

“NFQ is a strategic, long-term partner with truly top talents in the market. It stands out from the many solution providers of average quality,  looking to engage only for a short time. Our relationship with NFQ has always been one of positive collaboration built on trust and mutual growth in knowledge.”

Gianluca Randisi, Vice President for Products at home24.

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