Homes r Us Digital Transformation with Codilar Powered by Custom Engineering on Magento
Home & Decor
Company Brief
Established in 2003 with its first store at Madinat Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi, Homes r Us is the GCC's most loved home-grown furniture and decor brand, with 26 stores spanning the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain.
As a complete lifestyle destination, the brand houses furniture, furnishings, and accessories across living, dining, bedroom, kitchen, kids, and office categories, serving a multicultural customer base in styles ranging from ethnic and classic to modern. Backed by the Lals Group and operating across four markets, Homes r Us has spent over two decades transforming homes and fulfilling the visions of homemakers across the region.
Elevating Product Listing Page Performance
Integrating PowerListing for Catalog Speed
Building Native Mobile Applications for Android & iOS
Enabling Multilingual Commerce for UAE & Qatar
Connecting ERP and Third-Party Search Systems
Automating Customer Communication Touchpoints
Project Overview
Codilar partnered with Homes r Us to solve a performance problem that was quietly suppressing conversion across one of the region's largest home decor catalogues. The engagement addressed slow product listing pages through PowerListing integration, built and launched native Android and iOS mobile applications with full bilingual support for English and Arabic-speaking customers, and connected the platform to ERP and third-party search systems for real-time data accuracy.
A click and collect feature and an automated SMS notification system were added to complete the purchase journey from browse to delivery. Codilar's work spanned every layer between the customer's first tap and their completed purchase.
Business Challenges
Category and filter pages were loading between 3 and 5 seconds, creating significant drop-off on a mobile-first platform
Sort operations, such as price low to high and high to low, were averaging 4 seconds per interaction
No native mobile applications existed for a customer base predominantly shopping on their phones
Language localization for Arabic-speaking customers across the UAE and Qatar was incomplete
Managing a catalog of over 25,000 products across 400 categories without ERP integration created data accuracy risks
Product pricing and stock availability required manual intervention to stay current
Customer communication across registration, order updates, and delivery had no automation behind it
Codilar's Solution Approach
Integrated PowerListing to restructure how filter and sort data is indexed
Built custom mobile APIs optimized specifically for the browsing and search patterns of mobile users
Developed and launched native Android and iOS applications with a bilingual language switcher for English and Arabic
Implemented ERP integration for real-time sync of product information, pricing, and inventory across the full catalog
Deployed third-party search to improve accuracy and speed of product discovery across 25,000 products
Introduced click and collect with store selection and predefined time slot booking
Built an automated SMS notification system covering registration, order confirmation, dispatch, and delivery
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Homes r Us had the scale, the brand, and the ambition. We gave them the platform to match all three, which eventually led to better performance ready for great CX & business scale.
Shahed Jamal
Practice Head, Adobe Commerce, Codilar
From Catalog Ceiling to Competitive Advantage: How Homes r Us Transformed Its eCommerce Experience
The Customer Experience Issues
In retail, the product listing page is where purchase intent is formed. It is where customers filter by price, sort by preference, and narrow a catalog of thousands down to the handful of products they actually want to buy. When that experience is slow, the decision to leave is made before the product is ever seen.
For Homes r Us, that hassle was consistent and measurable across every browsing session. Category pages were taking too long to load. Filter operations lagged. Sorting by price, one of the most common browsing behaviors on any retail platform, kept customers waiting. On a mobile-first platform serving customers who expect app-like immediacy, that wait was quietly suppressing intent before a single product was properly considered.
Why Getting Bigger Was Making Things Worse
Magento's default layered navigation processes filter and sort operations at runtime. For a catalog of a few hundred products, that is manageable. For 25,000 products across 400 categories, it means every filter tap triggers a database query of meaningful size. The more the catalog grows, the worse it gets. It is not a bug. It is an architectural ceiling, and Homes r Us had hit it.
Our answer was PowerListing, our proprietary product listing solution built specifically for large-catalog Adobe Commerce environments. Rather than processing at runtime, PowerListing restructures how listing data is indexed so that filter and sort responses are served from pre-computed results. What had been taking seconds now took milliseconds. The catalog that had been a performance liability became what it was always supposed to be, a competitive advantage.
Solving Speed Revealed an Entirely Different Gap
Solving the catalog layer revealed the next constraint clearly. The platform had no native mobile applications. Homes r Us's customers were shopping on phones, but the experience they were getting was a mobile web session, not an app. For a brand competing in a market where mobile commerce expectations are set by platforms with dedicated engineering teams, that gap mattered.
We built Android and iOS applications from the ground up. The design brief was not to port the website to a smaller screen but to build something that felt native, fast, intuitive, and responsive to the actual interaction patterns of mobile shoppers. Custom mobile APIs were developed alongside the apps, optimized specifically for the search and listing behaviors of mobile users rather than simply adapting the existing web APIs.
The bilingual requirement added a layer that could not be treated as a late-stage addition. Homes r Us serves customers in both English and Arabic across the UAE and Qatar, two languages with fundamentally different reading directions, typographic requirements, and interface conventions. We implemented a language switcher through the splash screen, allowing customers to set their preference at the start of every session. The result was a genuinely bilingual experience, not a translated one.
Outcomes
at a Glance
Filter Page Load
Time Reduction
Sort Operation
Speed Improvement
Overall PLP Load
Time Reduction
Operational Efficiency
Improvement
Improvement in Customer
Satisfaction
Outcomes
at a Glance
Filter Page Load
Time Reduction
Sort Operation
Speed Improvement
Overall PLP Load
Time Reduction
Operational Efficiency
Improvement
Improvement in Customer
Satisfaction
“Codilar has helped us to build a robust omnichannel eCommerce platform for Carter's, Homes r Us, Mom Store and OshKosh. The team at Codilar is young, talented and extremely nimble. They highly focus on a customer centric approach which resonates well with our values at Lals Group.”
Dharmendra Mehta
Group Head of eCommerce
Lals Group
Change That Created Impact
The engagement delivered outcomes across every layer it touched. The browsing experience that had been losing customers to slow load times became one of the fastest in the category. The catalog became accurate in real time. The platform became genuinely native on mobile. And the customer journey, from first browse to final delivery, became connected and consistent for the first time.
Partnering with Codilar gave Homes r Us something that two decades of physical retail had already proven, that the quality of the experience is inseparable from the quality of the brand. If your eCommerce platform is carrying a catalog your customers cannot browse fast enough, or a mobile experience that does not match what your brand stands for, that gap is costing you more than you can measure in a dashboard. We bring the platform depth, the proprietary tooling, and the end-to-end commerce engineering to close it.
Accuracy Behind the Storefront
A fast, well-designed storefront built on inaccurate data is a different kind of problem, one that surfaces at checkout and erodes the trust that the front-end experience was building. For Homes r Us, the absence of ERP integration meant that product information, pricing, and stock availability required manual processes to stay current across a 25,000-product catalog. At that scale, manual is not a process. It is a risk.
We integrated the platform directly with the Homes r Us ERP system, enabling real-time synchronization across the full catalog. Product details, prices, and inventory levels now update automatically, removing the overhead and the exposure that came with manual management. Third-party search integration was layered on top to ensure that customers searching within that catalog were getting results that were accurate, fast, and relevant.
The CX Orchestration Magic
Speed gets customers to the product. Integration keeps the data accurate. But the purchase journey does not end at checkout, it ends when the customer has what they ordered and knows that every step along the way was communicated clearly.
We implemented an automated SMS notification system that covered every meaningful touchpoint: registration confirmation, order placed, order out for delivery, order delivered. Each message triggered automatically, removing the gaps that had been leaving customers uncertain about their orders.
Click and collect completed the picture, allowing customers to select their preferred store or warehouse, choose a pickup date and time slot, and finish a purchase that began online in person. For a brand with 26 physical locations across the region, that connection between digital and in-store was not an add-on. It was a natural extension of what Homes r Us had always been.
