People love Ikea, the blue giant with yellow sign has definitely made you buy more than what you needed and there are several important strategies for example, we went to Ikea to buy a painting and ended up purchasing furniture worth hundreds of dollars 😆
And here is why:
- Ikea is a giant maze. You are forced to enter a showroom to view all the nice things that you could have in your living room, bedroom, kitchen and heck yes even in the bathroom — you definitely checked out that amazing smelling Ikea candle right?
- Broad signs. Where can I just find my painting? If you notice most signs in Ikea are not based on product types but sections of your house. Fine, that’s for the showroom but when you actually get to the store, you still have to navigate through the entire store to find your painting because there is a clever lack of signs to where you will find it. So just say good-bye to walking through shortcuts and trying to save time in the Ikea store because you never will 😣 but nice try though.
- Food! I mean who does not love Ikea food. Ikea knows how to tire you from shopping and navigating your way through their entire store so they are nice enough to offer up more lucrative items like their food and snacks store.
No matter how clever this store + showroom combination purchase experience is, at the end of the tiresome day you still have to wait in a long line and lift boxes of heavy furniture onto a cart that is not designed to support.
So IKEA lovers, here is what I have to say — stop going to IKEA and just buy ONLINE, you might even find better deals on Amazon! But more importantly, since I love IKEA so much I think there are better ways to enhance the existing store experience. IKEA deserves credit because no other brick-and-mortar store other than COSTCO is capable of retaining users for that long and using their store design to enhance, and convert the user to buying 👏
Here are few key things that could be enhanced:
SUPPLY CHAIN MODEL JUST DOES NOT WORK
The warehouse and store model has a bunch of issues. Firstly, it complicates the entire supply chain model since now you have to keep track of your inventory in two places: your actual warehouses and the individual stores. Well if IKEA had done a good job at this, I would not be writing about this but most of the times this is a complicated problem to optimize on and here is how it comes into play.
Let’s say for example, I bought a bed frame at Ikea which had five different pieces I had to gather in order for full assembly. If you order this online, then it goes directly to the warehouse near you, if they have the supply they get it otherwise your order is canceled. Now let’s say Ikea had A, B , C available and D and E were out of stock since this bed frame was super in demand. Then Ikea might ask you to go a store near you to look for D and E. You are super determined to get this particular bed frame and decide to fight against all your laziness to get up and go to that one IKEA store miles away from you, which is almost always crowded on weekends. You find D 🙌 but oh shucks, E is not in store. So what do you do at this point? CANCEL YOUR ORDER!
After all your efforts, your best bet is just to wait till the item is stocked. The underlying problem is that IKEA is having issues keeping track of inventory that is usually broken down into pieces and here is why. That missing piece could have been in store, rotting in some section that you do not know since some stranger decided to get it and then left it at a place unknown to you.
This is equally likely to happen to a person who goes to the store and finds missing pieces. (Claps if you have experienced this too)
Modular furniture is great, especially when it comes to easy assembly and dis-assembling, for moving, and also for costs. However, the current warehouse + store model does not always work.
One way to solve this problem is to have a single place to store all the inventory and force the consumer to buy it online plus free delivery.
Single place to track all the key pieces of the bed frame and when a person orders a set they order it as a whole and no problem of a stranger misplacing the key piece that you require for your bed frame, allowing for a fulfilled order, hassle-free way to get furniture and overall a happy customer.
Here are benefits for IKEA:
- All inventory in a single place so easy to keep track and predict when stock runs out
- Guaranteeing a free shipping and delivery in fact entices the customer to buy more which could be costs IKEA could save from unfulfilled orders.
- Almost every order is fulfilled unless really the IKEA warehouse is out of stock
- Easy shopping experience for the end customer, no lines or wait times, fewer canceled orders
- Lesser help/assistance required in the aisles and no need to maintain/update cryptic product ids on tags of each product.
- No need for special carts that carry heavy furniture. I mean come on, those carts are not even designed to move your heavy furniture and really hard to maneuver.
Here are benefits to you as a customer:
- Hassle free way to buy and ship that piece of furniture you absolutely love to your house that comes with free delivery
- Imagine you are a petite, or old or handicapped person. Collecting all the missing and heavy pieces of the puzzle is just a game you do not want to waste your time on. Click and shop and your done!
- No more writing on the piece of paper the long product ids and aisle numbers, and no more searching through all the pieces and hoping that they are there, no more maneuvering a heavy cart(s) through the store to the checkout line, and no more waiting in long lines with giant sized boxes that you are embarrassed to now have bought and are just too heavy to put back. The whole experience just sucks, we all know it but we still love their furniture!
Fine, I went through the MAZE of showrooms, juggled through to find all my missing pieces of furniture, maneuvered this heavy piece of furniture cart and stood for a long time in line to checkout. It’s not over 😲
If you are a millennial like me or just believe in saving some energy and do not own a car, you now have a longer line awaiting for you at the end of the store. Thankfully there are some snacks on the way for you to buy and pick up.
And then you end up hearing you have to schedule time slots which are weeks away and pay extra on top of all your effort to get this delivered. At this point, I am thinking, why on earth did I come here to buy my furniture — JUST KILL ME 😢
DELIVERY & RETURNS EXPERIENCE
I mean why is that I need to schedule and PAY for my shipping and delivery in today’s world of free shipping? I get the scheduling part to assembling, experts are limited and it is actually smart that IKEA acquired TaskRabbit to accomplish this so KUDOS. But let’s talk about paying for shipping and delivery. I think this is where IKEA would benefit from collecting more statistics about a user’s experience post purchase as well like how many users are actually getting furniture delivered, is it a lot or less? how likely are they to also get it assembled? how likely are they to cancel the order if the delivery and assembly takes more than a week?
With retail stores dying, and more and more people purchasing online, I think something like delivery and shipping should be added incentive for a user to buy in store. Competitors like Wayfair and Amazon Prime almost always do this for orders greater than a minimum or if you have some sort of membership.
I also had the fortunate luck to go return an item in IKEA and my experience — ABSOLUTE WORST. IKEA’s returns system is based on a token system that I think I have last seen when I went to a Bank in India that barely has any infrastructure to support customers and guess what, they could care less about customer experience. So here is what you do if you want to return an item —
- First carry that heavy pieces of furniture back to the one store that is miles away
- Fine, you got this and didnt need assistance and you finally gather the furniture in the same poorly-designed cart and go towards the RETURNS line
- You press the button the says RETURNS and collect your token and it says 127 and just when you feel like the line will go through quickly, you notice a long line of people just waiting there, reading their kindles, a doll house for kids, and people talking to each other and making fun of how long it takes to return an item and then the store guy goes “Calling number 87”
- There goes my hopes. I ended up waiting a good one hour to return my item to get store credit and this is truly sad. I took a moment to empathize with all those little kids who are just treated with the IKEA store on weekends. Parents, I get you 😢
We understand IKEA, you do not want us to return items and you have made this tough but seriously I do not want to own these boxes that I am not going to use. In fact, returns should be the best experience you should ever offer. This is where partnering with someone like HAPPY RETURNS would be greatly helpful or I mean can I just stick a return label and ship you back, like please, oh btw — I am even willing to pay for the return label at this point?
IKEA lacks to put forth innovation in enhancing their store experience for which they are known leaders. IKEA invests in technology, we all know that with the massive success of their AR app called the IKEA place. Thanks IKEA, this is one of the best app you ever created and defined new standards for AR industry and apps to comes.
But to continue being the innovative leader in the retail space, IKEA needs to invest in redefining their purchase experience especially by enhancing their supply chain model, collecting more in-store experience data, providing better in-store assistance, providing richer product experiences, and optimizing on more fulfilled orders and happier customers.
MY TAKE ON A REDEFINED FUTURISTIC IKEA SHOPPING EXPERIENCE IN STORE
Each unique shopper gets an e-tag called a Cart ID, which is required for buying products in store (same concept applies online right now when you visit website). This tag could be something physical or even a number generated via text sent to their phone upon scanning a barcode when entering the store.
Once they are in the store, they could use this tag to link the products of interest directly from the showroom to their cart. This could be done via a tablet placed at each showroom, where the user could either tap their tag or scan a barcode on the product to add to their cart. This gives the user flexibility to add products they like right when they are in the showroom instead of taking pictures of the product ids or noting them down a paper, standard methods that people use right now which could be error-prone and cost a lot of time for the consumer if they miss a number.
Once the user scans all the products and associates the specific Cart ID to them, the cart is ready. At checkout, the user simply could use the Ikea app enter the cart id, edit items, pick delivery and schedule assembly and checkout or the user could be assisted to e-checkout when they present their cart id to the store person.
And the benefits:
- The infinite time saved: No more long lines, no more noting on paper or taking pictures, no more picking up stuff that you might not want, no more lifting heavy furniture,
- Hassle free furniture shopping: Easy to change your mind, easy to explore products, easy to checkout.
- No more spending a whole day at IKEA and did I say the kids got saved too in this effort? Yes, no more excuses for not doing your homework by saying my parents took me to IKEA!
- But really the largest benefit is that this is an effort to bridge the gap between a physical and online store since it provides the benefits of both to the user.
The value of a brick-and-mortar store is declining and consumers need to be entertained in new ways to experiences using technology and art but not at the cost of compromising on the purchase experience — it should be always smooth, easy and convenient to them.
Let me know your thoughts by leaving comments below and thank you for taking the time to go through my rant about IKEA 😃
Keep checking back my stories for more interesting shtuff! Adios, and TC.
