IKEA and its website

[modellingman]

I have just ordered a third IKEA kitchen in 2 years. Two for student rentals and one in a house in the Canary Islands.

I like the product, particularly the flexible design of drawers within drawers or behind cupboard doors. The cabinets are better quality than the equivalent B&Q products I have used previously. A slight downside is the restricted range of cabinet widths (no 500mm, 1000mm or 1200mm units) but the biggest bugbear for sheer awfulness is IKEA's website. Both English and Spanish.

It starts difficult, since the launch point is typically a complete finished cabinet. For example, I wanted a base corner cabinet. So I'm on a page which has a link which reads "METOD Corner base cabinet with carousel". I click on the link to find it is not quite this: yes, it is a corner base cabinet and it also has a carousel (which is also what I want) but it has RINGHULT white gloss doors which are definitely not what I want. With a bit of persistence (and remembering my previous experiences) I eventually click on a link labelled "Product details" which throws up a side panel and includes another link "Package details" which expands out to reveal that this is in fact 4 products - base cabinet, doors, carousel and hinges for attaching the doors to the cabinet. Bizarrely, though, no cabinet legs. The 4 products, each have their own IKEA nnn.nnn.nn style product code showing but annoyingly these are not provided as hyperlinks allowing a direct link through to the individual product page. So it is a case of copy and paste the code into the site's search box, then click on the single search result to get to the product page. It works, but the experience could be a lot better.

After eventually compiling my order list comprising 29 different product codes, I start to add these to my "basket". As expected as each new product code is entered it appears in my order list but, extremely unhelpfully, the list shows on screen in a complete different order to the order in which I enter the products. The onscreen list appears in a completely random order! This makes entering the order a bit more "fun" than it needs to be and to be sure I wasn't duplicating or omitting any line I resorted to comparing the running total onscreen with the cumulative running total from my spreadsheet-based order list.

I wonder why IKEA makes this part of its online experience so poor. As a retailer, the company seems to be successful. Perhaps their kitchen sales are predicated on the use of their in-store designers (who seem reasonably good) or their on-line design tool (which is extremely clunky and time consuming to use).

Rant over.

[UncleEbenezer]

My recollection of the Ikea website is that, once I'd figured it out, it was very helpful. Yes, it had glitches, but it was straightforward enough to check my order at the end. And the design tool for my wardrobe[1] was a real game-changer: gave me the confidence I needed about the difficult questions like can component A be used alongside B (e.g. hinges vs drawers).

[1] 275cm (9 ft) of it. Lots of drawers, shelves, and hanging space. That was a lot of Ikea boxes and a weekend's work building and fitting it.