Mike Wiebe

Ikea – the venerable brand for affordable, when-you-want-it furniture has always offered me a great retail experience. Their stuff is nice, there are lots of choices and it’s almost always in stock, ready for me to take home right away. I just experienced my first-ever online experience with Swedish furniture monolith, and let’s just say the offline and online experiences are certainly not in sync.

In a retail world Ikea really gets it. Every item they sell is displayed in context. The shopping experience is fun, well laid out and encourages you to envision what you could do in your home. If that’s not enough, the incredibly cheap cafeteria food and the almost constant baking of fresh cinnamon buns make it one of the more comfortable (and fattening) experiences of furniture shopping you will have.

A recent move to a smaller (read: Ikea-less) town with fewer retail choices has meant that Joanna and I are to doing a lot more shopping online. In fact, moving to the US has opened up a whole new world to me. The prices are often amazing and standard (usually free) delivery means items arrive in 2-3 days instead of 2-3 weeks like back in Canada.

It was my assumption that the Ikea experience would translate brilliantly into the web world. However, I was completely wrong. To start off, Ikea doesn’t make finding certain items on their website particularly easy. Also, they don’t list every single item that they offer in stores. In some cases, they offer certain bundles of products but make it impossible to buy the separate items like you can in an actual store.

A perfect example of this is our Billy bookshelf system. We currently have one and we want to buy some other sizes and pieces. Ikea won’t let us do this online. Instead we would have to buy a set, which would include a bunch of pieces we don’t need or want. This was frustrating to say the least.

We also wanted a nice round table for our new basement. We found one on the Ikea site and I immediately ordered it. Interestingly enough – we also went to a local furniture store and ordered a custom built round wood table for upstairs the same day we ordered this one. But more about this later…

My first surprise was that once I placed my order, I was informed my item wouldn’t ship for another week. Not really up to par with the “walk out with it now” experience offered in their stores. When the item finally shipped a week later, I didn’t get any shipment tracking information. All I received was a generic statement that it would arrive in 3-7 business days. I might also add that I was given no options for faster shipping options during the process of actually ordering the table. I probably would have paid for overnight shipping if I was given the choice.

I patiently waited for my table to arrive. In fact we went well beyond the max time of 7 days first promised. Since I had no tracking number, I had no way of finding out where this thing even was. So I called the telephone number listed in my original e-mail. This number led into a range of “push 1 for this” or “push 2 for that” options.  The problem was none of them were clearly labeled for customers who had a problem with an online purchase.  That meant I had to do guess work with my button pushing. On several occasions, my choices lead to a dead end where I didn’t get to talk to anyone. I might also add that pushing “0″ didn’t put me through to anyone that could help me either. Has anyone from Ikea ever tried to dial into the own phone line and listen to things from a customer perspective?

I finally lucked out and got myself into a phone que that applied to what I was trying to do. After waiting on hold for about 30 minutes, I finally got to speak with a service person. However, this person was only capable of repeating my order details back to me. I asked why there wasn’t just a tracking number and he replied, “we don’t get any from the carrier we use”. He then put me through to someone else who he thought could help. This person looked up my details and told me the table was sitting at the carrier. Not sure how she did that without having a tracking number. She then offered to give me the carrier’s number so I could call them. This response set me off. I ordered from Ikea and paid Ikea. Aren’t they responsible for getting the item to me? Her response to me on this matter was, “it was my responsibility to call and arrange for pick up”. She then offered me the number again.

At this point I asked, “How was I supposed to know the table was sitting with the carrier and how would I ever call them since you never give out any number when customers place an order?” She didn’t really have a good response for this one. I begrudgingly took the number and called the carrier myself since she was clearly not going to take care of it.

The carrier company told me that the table was just arriving at their facility that night, so I am not sure where it had been for the two weeks prior. They told me someone would call to arrange for a delivery time once it arrived. When I asked why they were so late, the carrier responded, “we’re not late, we promise Ikea 7-14 working days”. That’s a far cry from the 3-7 they promise on their site. In fact, that would make it an outright lie.

So why did I mention the other table we had custom built, custom painted and custom upholstered? It’s now sitting in my house for me to enjoy and use. The Ikea table? Still no sign of it. Not very good for a company that can figure out how to build almost anything with a single allen key.

Update (7/23/08): Ikea sent out a survey to me to gather my feed back (which obviously was not going to be good). The survey had obvious typos which didn’t make it look very professional. I took the time to fill it out only to get an error message at the end. So they care enough to do a survery, they just don’t care enough to make sure it works I guess….

Moving McAllister