e.g. this dresser is available in many sizes but you wouldn't know from the product page: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/storklinta-3-drawer-chest-white...
At best you can then search for "STORKLINTA" but the result list has the other sizes mixed with all sorts of other products such as beds: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/search/?q=STORKLINTA
While a T-shirt has the same purpose in S M or L, a table isn't the same if it's lower smaller than 50cm or longer than 1.5m, or lower than 60cm or higher than 70cm. In a standard shop you'd call that a night stand, or a coffee table, or a kids' table or living room's low table etc.
If you think of it as shopping for an environment (same as half of the in-shop experience: they'll show you full rooms where you can see products fit together) it makes sense. Somewhat.
https://www.ikea.com/jp/en/cat/hemnes-bedroom-series-58619/
And the other Hemnes lines include book stands, dish cabinets, TV stands.
I totally agree IKEA doesn't give a damn about series and collection consistency.
[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/chests-of-drawers-10451/?filt...
The list even isn't sorted and looks like a SELECT without order from a database.
It is really odd they don't have a (sub) category page for each of the series.
Please look at it quickly and try understanding what elements are available.
Or, say, Platsa having half of the pieces called Småstad, because they kinda would also fit in kid's room. Or trying to find codenames for doors/facades/drawers of Metod or Pax.
So they have a website that sort of teases you, but isn’t actually good enough to replace the physical stores.
You’ll start on the website, but get frustrated with it and eventually just drive over to IKEA to find the items you want. And you’ll also come home with some candles, picture frames, and a couple packs of frozen meatballs.
They made efforts during COVID so they're obviously aware of the issue, and I'm sure they al see it as lost opportunity, but probably still don't want to eat the cost or go full Amazon and have their own centers.
TBH as a customer I'm fine with keeping in-store price low instead of subsiding the online store.
So I bought bosch laser meter to be sure I don't mess up planning in their online planning software. We even asked Ikea to send a company that usually builds entire kitchen for them (aka their local partners), just to come for measuring and confirm my numbers (especially the angle of that roof, defines how tall and wide cabinets can fit underneath). It took forever, and the person doing measurements f*cked up badly, adding 30cm width to the place under the roof by mistake. He was re-measuring it but came with same number. I was suspicious of such a huge difference and luckily found his mistake, reverting back to my numbers (so we just wasted 1 month waiting for this company, even ignoring the fee).
Anyway, even with all their planning, in-person consultation, they messed up delivery and few items were missing, and they added few unnecessary items. Since delivery consists of 80+ brown boxes of all sizes that are just dumped on you, there is no way to find any mismatch out before building the actual kitchen. A lot of "fun" around that, I burned some vacation from this year on just chasing their mistakes.
Coming back to original topic - plinths or whatever goes under bottom cabinets to cover the gaping hole where legs are, were insufficient so we now have 0.5m hole there, waiting for item delivery while workers are long gone. Nothing is immediately available for pickup here, so waiting few weeks on piece of plastic weighting 1kg, 2.4m long, that costs cca 30$. Delivery - 100$, no way to even get it delivered to their shop, it needs to be a home delivery.
This is Switzerland, one would expect a bit better service in 2025 for their visibly elevated prices compared to EU all around. I did order the item in French Ikea instead, delivery was 'only' 40$. Not much competition for that price point here, but stellar quality service it certainly wasn't.
/rant
If only they actually had a decent density of stores in the US. I live north of a major metro area (Boston) and I have to drive over 1.5 hours to an IKEA. I used to live in Raleigh, NC and the closest one was over 3.5 hours away.
Although maybe this is part of the strategy, getting you to travel a long distance to there stores in order to keep you there.
And, yes, I would probably have bought some other things had I gone to the store.
He has to sit through talks about how Ikea is a bussiness that already works very well and the most important thing is to avoid any changes that have even a 0.001% chance of making it not work. Many relatively trivial deployments have to be approved by a lengthy international bureaucracy, with a focus on preventing any automation that can eventually result in workforce not being needed. Things like that.
I worked for a few years at a 100+ year old privately owned (same family) B2B supplier with insane profits. Website was outdated but highly practical, sales/CRM (if you can call it that) systems were mostly command line and hadn't changed fundamentally since the 1980s. These systems worked, and any proposal to change anything took months of meetings and debates and review of every cost/benefit possible. Proving that a change directly translated to a clear revenue metric was nearly impossible– for at least this niche, would more modern sales software actually translate to more orders? (answer: not really, a question reanalyzed every few years in depth). Would a nicer website get more conversions? (also no, something A/B tested to death every few years). Changing the position of one product grouping by a few pixels might be a 6 month job, lol.
By contrast, their fulfillment center was cutting edge, highly automated, and relatively experimental– if it improved the speed and cut costs, they jumped right on. These are much easier to measure as profitable.
While I don't shop that much at Ikea, I still remember their product lines, will sift through the dozens of combinations and PDFs, and take notes while looking at the building instructions to see what could be done with a product.
Most of us will choose Ikea for the flexibility, and will happily do some amount of research anyway.
Until reading your comment it didn't hit me that the site was so different from other brands, like Apple for instance. And I sure don't enjoy Apple's site. But then Ikea shops aren't traditional shops either, if sifting through pages of products isn't your thing, walking through sinuous paths all around the shop won't be either.
It's a fundamentally different public.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/eket-inserts-accessories-5928...
If we're talking about the "Product details" -> "Assembly and documents" part, that's 3 clicks away and looks pretty straightforward to me. You make it sound like it's 15 levels of links inside the privacy policy.
that contain all information about series in compact, easy to understand form. Try finding that pdf on their site. Now imagine chances of finding it for someone who is not aware it exists. All it would take Ikea is adding one more pdf to the "Assembly and documents" section, so why hide these so much?
Certainly, Ikea organizes their stores in a way that probably encourages impulse purchases.
Why is everything so shit? Isn't getting me to buy their pax with as many interior elements as possible how they make money?
Ingvar Kamprad was a lifelong fascist, which heavily influences IKEA. Loyalty over competence, futurism over tradition, things like that.