Stock is also low in the Portland store, but even the few items available can't be purchased online and shipped to me. I've tried to order a number of things recently and they won't ship anything to my house.
- 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.
If this is how bad it looks from the outside I can only imagine what it’s like working there.
still limited to things available in the local ikea, you can not mix "online" available and local available stuff...
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.
> (...) 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE&ab_channel=Movie...
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
IKEAs online experience is glossy but horribly non-functional, agreed :/ Had that experience in Sweden as well. There is simply no way to buy something which isn't in stock in the local warehouse either, their support actually told me to "try to buy it every day".
I went to the Ikea in Brooklyn back in November... in that store because of limited space they actually put up a tent in the parking garage for fulfillment. It just worked awkwardly.
Other than that, the magic of a place like Ikea is they source from a global market and make it magically appear. In 2020/2021, the magic is broken because global supply chains are broken. In my own business, I have about 18 people working on sourcing various commodities, where as in 2019 we had 4 doing the same job.
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.
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.
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.
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).