Founded in 1974 with a single store in Melbourne, JB Hi-Fi is now the No. 1 retailer of technology, consumer electronics, home entertainment, and home appliances in Australia. From humble beginnings, JB Hi-Fi has grown their annual revenue in excess of $6.5 billion.
JB Hi-Fi operates from more than 200 stores in Australia and New Zealand and is known for providing customers with the biggest range of products from the best brands at great prices. Customers continue to shop at JB Hi-Fi for the customer service delivered by their passionate and knowledgeable team members.
In recent years, their online business has grown and customers can engage with JB Hi-Fi across their stores, online channels, live chat and over the phone sales with price negotiation.
That’s why JB Hi-Fi has built an enduring partnership with Shopify and their online revenue has increased to more than $1 billion. Shopify has enabled JB Hi-Fi to innovate quickly and at scale without disruptions.
Since moving to Shopify, JB Hi-Fi has seen:
- $1 billion in annual online sales, a 5x increase from $200 million
- 15% of total sales driven by online sales, an increase from 5%
- 50% increase in online sales revenue in New Zealand
The challenge: Pivoting at scale required greater agility
The bigger the sales, the higher the stakes, and the greater the need for a stable commerce platform. This is something the JB Hi-Fi leadership team knows given their previous, outdated legacy commerce solution had struggled to handle increased traffic volumes during peak sales periods due to platform instability.
During one Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales weekend, the volume of customers trying to create new online accounts in order to checkout with JB Hi-Fi triggered a locking issue. This meant that very few customers could buy anything online for a two-hour period during the retailer's busiest weekend.
As JB Hi-Fi’s annual online sales revenue has broken through the $1 billion mark, there was also a need to evolve with consumer preferences and business needs, whilst maintaining platform stability. For JB Hi-Fi, flexibility is key to creating great customer experiences, including streamlined fulfillment.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, JB Hi-Fi stores were temporarily closed to customers. The retailer needed to adapt and get products that were purchased online to customers quickly. With over 80% of JB Hi-Fi’s online fulfillment handled by their physical stores, this proved a complex challenge.
The need for a flexible commerce foundation also came to the fore when JB Hi-Fi made the move to migrate their online New Zealand business to Shopify to match their optimised shopping experiences in Australia. But with a limited budget, the retailer needed to find a way to expand their Shopify code base to rebuild their commerce stack in New Zealand.
Given JB Hi-Fi’s growth trajectory, the incumbent commerce platform simply wouldn’t have provided the flexibility and stability to comfortably handle rapid growth and keep pace with consumer needs. This is why their partnership with Shopify has become more important as the business has expanded and achieved new levels in terms of sales, revenue, and market reach.
The solution: A flexible platform for iterative innovation
JB Hi-Fi implemented Shopify in 2019, using the platform’s reliability and scalability to their advantage during peak sales periods. With the retailer recording their best-ever Black Friday and Cyber Monday in their first year with Shopify, handling nearly twice the previous year’s traffic with ease, holiday seasons were no longer laden with anxiety.
My anxiety going into my first Black Friday was at its highest. Shopify exceeded my expectations. Not only did we stay operational, but we absolutely smashed Black Friday and the whole peak period. They are stable, reliable, and they're always up, which makes my job a lot easier.
Since the initial implementation, Shopify’s cloud-based flexibility and scalability has comfortably handled JB Hi-Fi's lift in online sales from 5% to 15% of total sales.
When adopting Shopify, JB Hi-Fi focused on developing a consistent application programming interface (API) framework for their commerce infrastructure. Shopify’s API architecture meant the platform could easily integrate with JB Hi-Fi’s tech stack in a pattern-driven way, helping their engineers build better customer experiences while supporting over 200 dispatch locations.
Given that we have over 200 stores, and we need to seamlessly manage pricing, promotions, and product information effectively, we run that from the centre of the business and we heavily leverage the APIs into Shopify to make that seamless across all our channels. That's what the customer expects.
Even with JB Hi-Fi’s complex tech stack, Shopify’s API architecture has allowed the retailer to innovate quickly while being able to rely on the Shopify platform to take care of their core commerce needs. This means Shopify removes unnecessary complexity, so JB Hi-Fi’s engineers have more freedom to be creative and innovative in what they build.
There is a lot to consider in a retail business as large as JB Hi-Fi is. We have many different types of SKUs of many different sizes, 200 stores, and several channels. So we think very carefully about how we use APIs to compartmentalize the functions of the business. That’s really important with Shopify. We can break up the problem space, from pricing and product, all the way to fulfillment. Shopify fits in with that architecture really, really well.
JB Hi-Fi could keep different elements of their commerce tech stack separate while seamlessly integrating them with Shopify’s API. This gave the JB Hi-Fi team the ability to make changes quickly and ensured things continued to work well together.
The flexibility provided by Shopify’s API capabilities were leveraged through the extended COVID-19 lockdowns and JB Hi-Fi pivoting to provide rapid delivery services for customers stuck at home. JB Hi-Fi used real-time APIs with the Shopify platform to develop and introduce a 90-minute delivery service for customers, Store-to-Door.
At first, the Store-to-Door service relied on store team members to carry out home delivery duties while stores were closed to the public. The service proved so popular that, after stores opened back up, JB Hi-Fi established an ongoing service using Uber drivers and their vehicles for delivery within 90 minutes of placing an order.
As part of the project, which took just over 12 weeks to develop and deploy, JB Hi-Fi’s inventory management system was integrated via API with Shopify, including the checkout page, so stores could action the orders upon purchase. This enabled online order fulfillment from stores, with items packed and shipped to customers in less than two hours from their time of order.
The Store-to-Door service with Uber was an amazing project that we worked on together with Shopify. It represented the first time that we could offer an Uber-type experience where you order online and you can have the product delivered to your door in under 90 minutes.
Meanwhile, JB Hi-Fi’s New Zealand business had historically been on a different commerce platform to the Australian business. This meant that New Zealand customers weren’t getting the same excellent JB Hi-Fi experience. The retailer wanted to rectify this by migrating to Shopify. But time, budget, and resources were slim.
JB Hi-Fi worked with Shopify to create a multi-tenanted environment, which allowed both the New Zealand and Australian sites to share the same code base. This approach not only saved time and money, it also simplified the retailer’s commerce infrastructure and reduced their total cost of ownership (TCO).
An added bonus of this approach was that the retailer could quickly and easily test new innovations in another market before rolling them out to their entire customer base, thanks to a multi-tenanted architecture.
One of the critical things we've been able to do with the multi-tenanted solution is to test the re-architecture of the checkout experience in New Zealand. We've been able to deploy that in New Zealand weeks ahead of when we deploy it into the much bigger market in Australia.
The results: $1 billion in online sales with no signs of stopping
Projects like Store-to-Door and the New Zealand migration demonstrate how, when new needs emerge, Shopify collaborates closely with JB Hi-Fi to find a solution. Further, Shopify’s innovation pipeline, featuring more than 200 product and feature updates every year, means JB Hi-Fi can lead the market using the latest technology without needing to develop it all internally.
JB Hi-Fi’s enduring partnership with Shopify has resulted in continuous innovation that drives value. For instance, the migration to Shopify in New Zealand has driven a 50% increase in online sales revenue in that market — just one of the ways Shopify has supported the growth of JB Hi-Fi’s online business from 5% to over 15% of total sales revenue.
With Shopify giving JB Hi-Fi the best tools to innovate, and JB Hi-Fi’s evolving needs driving the collaborative development of new solutions with Shopify, the partnership is built on shared objectives and goals.
Shopify is easily our best partner. They challenge us, we challenge them. And our customers get the best result.
Because Shopify provides core commerce capabilities out of the box that can be extended or replaced entirely to meet the needs of the business, it frees up JB Hi-Fi's own engineering team to spend more time and resources on other priorities, such as improving customer experience and exceeding evolving consumer expectations.
For elements that JB Hi-Fi want to focus on optimising internally, Shopify’s API architecture provides an open platform where they can build or integrate tailored solutions to solve specific problems, such as integrating custom discounts into the JB Hi-Fi Perks Program using Shopify’s Cart API, driving conversion and loyalty among existing customers.
Peak traffic periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are no longer an issue thanks to Shopify’s cloud-based reliability and scalability, with JB Hi-Fi easily handling twice the previous year’s BFCM online store traffic in their first year on Shopify. Site performance has also improved, with average page load times decreasing by more than 15% in the first year after switching to Shopify.
By not having to worry about scale, capacity or performance, we can spend more time enhancing the customer experience and optimizing our deal pricing strategy.
Overall, since migrating to Shopify, JB Hi-Fi’s annual online sales revenue has grown from around AU$200 million to more than AU$1 billion, reflecting surging market demand for online shopping — an increase the retailer has comfortably managed and capitalized on with Shopify as their trusted commerce partner.
Shopify’s focus is absolutely on our success. I feel like they’re not primarily driven by making sales to us. They're more interested in actually developing a partnership that helps us both get to the outcomes we want.
With Shopify, JB Hi-Fi saw results fast.
- $1 billion in annual online sales, a 5x increase from $200 million
- 15% of total sales driven by online sales, an increase from 5%
- 50% increase in online sales revenue in New Zealand
