SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
Fnord666
on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:41PM
from the better-sell-screwdrivers-also dept.
from the better-sell-screwdrivers-also dept.
Ikea will start experimenting with selling its famous flatpack furniture through online retailers as part of a wider push to become more accessible to shoppers.
The Swedish chain - known for its vast edge-of-town outlets - is also testing a smaller city centre store format.
Other innovations include order and pick-up points and standalone kitchen showrooms.
The moves are a response to changing shopping patterns.
Ikea has has not said which websites will be part of the test, but Amazon and Alibaba are thought to be likely contenders.
The chain sells many of its 9,500 products on its own website, but was a late arrival to the online retail market.
Waiting on an endless line at the checkout is the best part about buying Ikea's goods.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Ikea to Sell Online on Third-Party Sites
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 29 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:37PM (10 children)
I'm not a fan of Ikea. Why someone would throw out or give away a hand made, finely crafted piece of furniture made from real solid timber and spend about as much in real terms as was probably paid for said item on a few rectangular boards of plastic covered fiberboard with a few holes drilled in them and maybe a groove or two is utterly beyond me.
It's like modern art. Scamming people out of large sums of money for something that costs almost nothing in terms of time, effort or cash to make.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:13AM (2 children)
You implied that people have finely made furniture to begin with. Ikea has always filled the starter home niche, so the Ikea furniture may not be the best, but it is functional and can be replaced gradually as required.
I dislike the Ikea shopping experience, but they are also one of the few locations I can buy minimalist furniture from. Also, they make reasonable decisions when it comes to sustainability: they don't depend heavily on China for manufacturing most products and do take steps to responsibly source products, while maintaining competitive prices.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:03AM (1 child)
I take your point. What I take issue with is households that did have the more traditional finely made furniture and chucked it out just because "new is better" and replaced it with stuff made from MDF. There are plenty of people that do this. Also, because of those people, you can often find the finely made furniture second hand at very close to the price of the flat pack MDF item - although I appreciate you're losing the convenience factor and would likely have to pay quite a bit for delivery. It's just the "new is always better" attitude that gets to me, when in this case, it isn't.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:46PM
Eh, while I'm not personally a huge fan of the "traditional finely made furniture," I do think that's a very different category than the Ikea style stuff. If I'm looking at Ikea, I'm not looking for "a bedroom dresser"; I'm looking for "some kind of long squat thing with drawers". Bedroom, living room, bathroom...doesn't matter, it's all the same. I'm not looking to buy a complete bedroom set, I'm looking for a bunch of modules that I can mix and match and modify to get the configuration I actually want. I think I only have one piece of furniture that I use exactly as designed (my kitchen table, which probably qualifies as "traditional finely made furniture"...which I was probably talked into wasting money on by my parents.) Some of that furniture I built myself; some I bought but only assembled part of it and threw the rest in my scrap bin; some I bought and then added additional parts or hardware. And I'm no carpenter, I don't have woodworking tools, I'm in a small apartment where the only power tools I can really have are a drill. But I can cut something square and I can paint it black, so that'll match any of these cheap MDF pieces just fine.
I don't buy that stuff because it's cheap or because it's new, I buy it because it's the only available style of minimalist furniture *modules*.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:15AM (1 child)
As a new(ish) homeowner, I'd love to buy your real solid timber furniture--but either it's crap or I can't afford it. If I have to buy crap just to have seat while I save for quality, it might as well be cheap and stylish. Once I'm done blowing money on debt and savings, I may look for this quality furniture you're talking about--because at that point the kids will hopefully be beyond their most destructive years. More likely, I'll have amassed a garage full of woodworking equipment necessary to make marginal solid wood bookshelves and tables. As long as it is good enough to keep the wife from blowing more cash at Ikea, then it is good enough.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:49AM
I have some stuff from Ikea. It's easy to assemble, but it also falls apart quickly. The dressers are useless because the bottoms of the drawers warp out immediately and make it impossible to pull out, with items from upper drawers cascading into the lower. The furniture is uncomfortable crap. But if you can't afford real furniture and insist on having a consistent look & feel, it's a solution.
If you're willing to tolerate a degree of eclecticism and do a little work, you can get some nice pieces for less than Ikea would cost. You pick up what other people throw away or want to get rid of in a fire sale and refurbish it. We filled up most of our house that way. The best find was a full sized leather sofa on Craig's list that had some damage to the leather, and whose elastic suspension had sprung. $80 for a side of chocolate leather from a wholesaler in Queens, a little elbow grease, and we had a fine sofa instead of the spending $3K we had been prepared to spend at Macy's for a brand-new one. Also used the old, distressed leather from the old one to create some cool-looking wallets, belts, etc.
Of course it takes time to do that, but it's a good return on investment because that piece will last and last. Also, it beats watching TV.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:56AM (1 child)
I have some of that type of furniture. Well, it's not the real hand-made all solid wood stuff, but it's the lower-grade stuff they made 30 years ago, with real wood front and sides, but cheaper wood composite for the back and drawer interiors. Still far better than what they sell as "good furniture" these days.
By the end of the month, I'll be rid of it all.
Why? Because I'm moving, and paying to move furniture 1500 miles across the country is not cost-effective; that stuff is heavy. Since it's nice, it begs for regular dusting and maintenance. You can't move the damn stuff easily to vacuum under it. (I wasn't handicapped when I bought it, but I am now; thanks cancer.) It's actually cheaper to buy replacement Ikea fiberboard items at the local Ikea when I get there, even with paying Ikea to pick and deliver it. It will be lighter and I'll be able to move it (most of the stuff I'm getting will have wheels for that purpose). Most importantly, if it gets damaged, who cares? As a plus, I _like_ putting Ikea stuff together; it's fun, although I'm a lot slower at it then most folks. I'll have time.
A friend of a friend of a friend who lost everything in one of the recent hurricanes is moving into my current area, and almost all of it is going to that family, to help them start their lives over. The friend chain is coming to pick it up from me; this way I don't have to pay anyone to haul it all off to the dump (or try to sell it on Craigslist and get murdered).
I know I'm an edge case, obviously. But this is just one answer to your question: the finely crafted stuff simply doesn't meet my needs anymore. I have better things to do than dust all the little nooks in fine furniture (I draw the line at crannies, they stay dusty).
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:07AM
Fair point.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:00AM (2 children)
I haven't made "finely crafted furniture" yet, but I have made Adirondack chairs from real solid timber. We live in an area with lots of oak and other hardwoods. After big windstorms I go out to the woods and look for windfallen trees. The wood for the Adirondack chairs came from a big oak that blew down on the block at the inlaws' house in the suburbs during Hurricane Sandy. It lay partially blocking the road for more than a week, with all the neighbors bitching and complaining that the city wasn't coming around to take care of it. So I took a chainsaw out, sawed it into suitable lengths, and shaped it into chairs. It was a fun project, even though I felt like I was cheating a little bit by using power tools instead of hand tools.
I had taken windfallen timber after the previous big storm, Hurricane Irene, and make my kids a bunch of wooden toys like samurai swords, so the chair project was the next step.
Making finely crafted furniture you could sell for big dollars is a real skill it takes years to master, but you don't need to know that much to create functional pieces and you'll enjoy the hell out of them, far more than store-bought, because you will have made them. Also, they're custom. My chairs all have a cup holder large enough to hold the gigantic Hofbrauhaus beer mug I brought back from Munich. It's the only quantity worth drinking beer in.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 12 2017, @04:46AM (1 child)
Pics?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:26AM
Sorry, no, not at hand.
Washington DC delenda est.