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Somewhat unrelated IKEA has been brought to it's knees during the pandemic and it has made their online ordering completely useless. For a company shifting foc

• Griffinsauce 6y ago
  Their support systems have also fully broken down here in the Netherlands. Phone is not available because their people are working from home (this is entirely a solvable problem...), there's no email and the chat channels are so overwhelmed that it takes a week for them to respond. This is not a great experience when you received nothing and your delivery is marked as "delivered a week ago" in a completely borked status page.
• ThePadawan 6y ago
  Personal anecdote, buz IKEA's online shopping has always suckes for me, even before 2020. - Shipping options disappear and reappear randomly when refreshing the shopping cart - some items just cannot be bought online for no clear reason (baking spatulas cannot, cooking spatulas can) - Several packages arrived completely smashed open, and returning them involved bringing them "back" to the nearest IKEA which wasn't particularly fun with 35kg of furniture and no car.
  • arkitaip 6y ago
    IKEA's online shopping even sucks in Sweden, with shipping being expensive or online ordering unavailable for many products. Honestly their rate if innovation kinda sucks outside their narrow field of expertise (huge furniture warehouses). Like, they have for decades been discussing offering small stores to sell everyday necessities to customers who can't or won't travel to their warehouses outside the cities, but nothing has come out of it.
    • brazzledazzle 6y ago
      On the US site I can’t even log in and view my orders. I have to paste in the order number. I also noticed my “IKEA family” login doesn’t work at the normal IKEA login page which makes me think it’s two distinct systems with some kind of federation. It’s bizarre and I can only imagine the legacy cruft and/or dysfunction that led to this. If this is how bad it looks from the outside I can only imagine what it’s like working there.
    • sethhochberg 6y ago
      It seems like something is maybe starting to happen with the small city store idea - in NYC, IKEA already has a pretty normal-sized store in a relatively industrial area of Brooklyn, but recently opened an experimental small-format store in Queens and has a really small-format store in Manhattan.
    • ferryman 6y ago
      They're headquartered in the Netherlands and it sucks here as well. Their operations are not optimised for a high volume of online orders and their website does a really poor job of handling that.
  • bobthepanda 6y ago
    Also, don't make the mistake of trying to call for a return. IKEA US had a 3+ hour long wait for the phones.
  • universa1 6y ago
    the online shopping isn't the best, but then with the current lockdown in germany you can do click&collect and get your stuff in the parking garage... still kinda sad they still charge 10€ extra for that (instead of 15 during normal times), but then it worked flawlessly and the stuff was ready for pickup the next day. still limited to things available in the local ikea, you can not mix "online" available and local available stuff...
  • mrweasel 6y ago
    > some items just cannot be bought online for no clear reason I think there's a pretty clear reason. During normal circumstances, those items are not sold online, because they specifically WANT you to go to a warehouse. If you're looking for a couch or a table, it doesn't matter than much, that's deliberate shopping. The smaller items, those lead to impulse purchases. Even tried going to Ikea to just get a frying pan, or a bath mat? You'll end up buying 10 more items, because: Hey, it's cheap, and the drive was 30 minutes the wrong way, might as well stock up.
    • ThePadawan 6y ago
      That doesn't explain why I can buy single coat hangers online, but not single spatulas. > (...) You'll end up buying 10 more items This is also sort of a meme. I have taken trips to IKEA maybe 30 times in my life, and I walked out of there with exactly what was on my shopping list (or less, because the items sucked or were out of stock) 95% of the time.
      • DonHopkins 6y ago
        You should try Spatula City! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE&ab_channel=Movieclips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE&ab_channel=Movie...
      • ema 6y ago
        It probably depends on the person. I for one never leave IKEA without having bought something I hadn't even thought about beforehand.
        • avh02 6y ago
          I feel cheated if i don't impulse buy something. :p
  • wojciii 6y ago
    The site is horrible and their phones are not being taken because they have too many calls here in DK. I'm not going to use IKEA unless I strictly have to based on the experiences I had during the last few months.
  • matsemann 6y ago
    > Shipping options disappear and reappear randomly when refreshing the shopping cart I got saved by this not long ago. Needed a fridge the next day after moving into a new apartment. Was prepared to spend the day cycling to IKEA, buy the fridge and rent a car, get it all the way home, deliver the car and bike back. But then the website borked and let me choose next day express carry inside for 0,- saving me the trouble of carrying the fridge up stairs, renting a car etc.
  • avh02 6y ago
    Also anecdotal: needed some small items from there (because it matches what I've already got) and their click and collect in Berlin was super well done. You could order to pick up the next day. They had converted their entrance and exit "lobbies" in to a zone where carts of items were prepped and after they confirm your order they'd just roll the cart with your order out of the door and leave you to take it from there. Obviously you have to be prepared for heavier items, etc, but it was fast. That said, I had some less urgent stuff to get, and ordered online, took 3 weeks to even process/ship (though i knew that in advance)
• szszrk 6y ago
  This is unfortunately true for my country as well. Online catalog is not on par with regular store availability. It's even weirded if you take into account that their delivery fees are very high. It's often cheaper to buy small amounts of IKEA goods from resellers that just go to IKEA and buy it for you, then ship with standard services. Does US stores also have the ability to pick items up from a warehouse next to their stores? Btw. how is this option also a paid one is beyond me. This is unfortunate as they have a really cool offer of smart devices (lights, remotes, battery powered blinds, etc), which by default are not online (can be connected with things like google now but it's limited to local physical gate device by default). It's hard to actually buy all of these in one place, you have to hunt.
  • MrGilbert 6y ago
    > Does US stores also have the ability to pick items up from a warehouse next to their stores? Btw. how is this option also a paid one is beyond me. That's because every IKEA store is it's own warehouse. Everything you can see is the stock. There is only a small part where you can store stuff. So, instead of you running around and picking stuff from the shelves, an employee has to do it. It's basically a "convenience fee", because it's more expensive for IKEA to collect it for you then you collecting it. I'm not here to judge, though...
    • szszrk 6y ago
      You are right that it is work that needs to be done and should be paid for, but some local companies offer transport plus assembly in the price of IKEA transport only. Also in Poland availability is different when I try to buy same thing online, check if it's present in local store, or order the same item to be picked up by myself from warehouse next to store. It's even weirder! Sometimes I order things that are "present in my local store" with transportation, but the actual transportation is made from a central warehouse in different part of the country. So IKEA's "availability" is clearly a concept very different from what client might think. > So, instead of you running around and picking stuff from the shelves, an employee has to do it. Here warehouses are usually buildings next to the actual store. So in either case employee has to pick it up from warehouse, but with "pick up from warehouse yourself" option they don't need to transport it to the store next by. I still have to pay for that extra. It's just weird.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  Maybe a large scale logistic issue ? just sayin, some bike store had empty shelves due to border restrictions. Maybe IKEA local store have long term inventory while the website relies on far away central warehouse that was locked ?
• justin66 6y ago
  Their online ordering was never any good. I hate to think it’s gotten worse.
  • rplnt 6y ago
    It wasn't the ordering that sucked, they had very limited capacity at the stores to actually prepare the goods, as well as limited (and expensive) shipping. E.g. limiting orders per day - you had to order at midnight.
    • brazzledazzle 6y ago
      It’s definitely both a trash online shopping experience as well as capacity issues. Considering there’s a pandemic I can’t blame them for the latter but the former deserves the criticism.
• madsohm 6y ago
  In Denmark it's even worse than sucky shipping. Here we pay to collect our purchased items ourselves. So it's the items price plus ~$6 to collect it.
  • johnchristopher 6y ago
    IKEA's click and collect. It's my understanding that the extra fee pays for time not spent in IKEA's alley (click) and the preparation of your purchases (collect).
• vincentmarle 6y ago
  Besides the fact that the items that I needed weren’t in stock in the nearest 2 IKEA stores (which meant I had to drive 1.5 hrs to the 3rd one), the Click & Collect pickup itself was pretty seamless. Just park and scan the QR code and they bring the cart to your car.
• mytailorisrich 6y ago
  As many others have commented, IKEA's online ordering has always been bad and so has been their service, delivery fees are also quite high (in the UK at least). IMHO, their focus is the in-store experience and have an online offering because they feel they have to but they never wanted to develop it too much. Even their "click and collect" service is quite bad in my experience (but maybe that was that particular store): It's not well organised in-store, the collection area looks a mess, and the employees are uncaring.
• Zigurd 6y ago
  Last year I needed some bed linens. I like Ikea design, and I have some Ikea bed linens. My naive thought was that, surely, I could order bed linens online and have them delivered. No. No you can't. You just can't. That is astounding at a time when anyone with a free website whacked together in a no-code site-builder can drop in an e-commerce widget and have a first rate online shopping experience for customers, with a "cart," check-out, payment, etc. Even when I was willing to shop in person, Ikea's tech was a frustrating factor. You cannot tell if every component of a couch configuration you want is in stock. You can't put the stock on hold. All you get is a red/yellow/green indicator of how much stock a store has. Since a couch has several modules and each module has a separate stock item for base, back cushion, and seat cushion upholstery, the odds of getting everything in one trip approaches zero. I cannot think of anywhere else where a few tens of millions in tech development could more obviously build billions in enterprise value.