Ikea is taking on the likes of eBay, Craigslist and Gumtree with a peer-to-peer marketplace for customers to sell secondhand furniture to each other.
Ikea Preowned will be tested in Madrid and Oslo until the end of the year with the aim of rolling out the buying and selling platform globally, according to Jesper Brodin, chief executive of Ingka, the main operator of Ikea stores.
“This has been a dream in the making for a while,” Brodin told the Financial Times. “We are in a place in Ikea where we can do more advanced and cool stuff. There is an incredible confidence in the company evolving on digital.”
The new marketplace is part of a transformation at Ikea over the past few years as it moves from being an out-of-town retailer where customers have to pick up and build their own furniture to a business offering online sales, city-centre stores and services such as assembly.
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Ikea has had a small offering under which it buys used furniture from customers and resells it in store. But the new platform is more ambitious, aiming to tackle the secondhand market for customers selling directly to each other — an area where Brodin estimates Ikea has a higher market share than in new furniture sales.
Customers enter their product, their own pictures and a selling price while Ikea’s own artificial intelligence-enabled database brings in its own promotional images and measurements. The buyer collects the furniture directly from the seller, who has the option of receiving money or a voucher from Ikea with a 15 per cent bonus.
“Very often there is a monopoly or oligopoly on platforms that operate,” said Brodin, talking about eBay or digital classified ad services such as Gumtree in the UK and Finn in Norway. Finn has 8,700 items from Ikea listed in Oslo alone. Early offerings on Ikea Preowned include large items such as sofas for up to €600 and wardrobes for €450 as well as smaller items such as a toilet roll holder for €4.
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Listings are free but Brodin said Ikea could eventually charge “a symbolic fee, a humble fee”.
He added: “We’re going to verify the full scope including the economics. If a lot of people use the offer to get a discount with Ikea — it’s a good way to reconnect with customers. I am very curious. I think it makes business sense.”
Ikea has previously tested selling its new furniture on third-party platforms such as Alibaba’s Tmall in China, but the Preowned platform marks its first foray into secondhand marketplaces. It also dovetails with the retailer’s wish to become “circular and climate positive” by 2030.
The world’s largest retailer had a plan to roll out online shopping worldwide within three years in 2020 but the Covid-19 pandemic pushed it to accelerate that to six weeks.
“That was a matter of survival for us,” Brodin said. “We were 100 per cent closed. The digital transformation saved us.”
He added that Ikea now wanted to develop a platform that was “the go-to place for home furnishing”, of which the marketplace would be “one of the most important parts”. Other parts could include services, finance and home planning as well as shopping, he added.