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Ikea is taking over the likes of eBay, Craigslist and Gumtree with a peer-to-peer market for purchasers to promote secondhand furnishings to one another.
Ikea Preowned shall be examined in Madrid and Oslo till the top of the yr with the goal of rolling out the shopping for and promoting platform globally, in response to Jesper Brodin, chief government of Ingka, the principle operator of Ikea shops.
“This has been a dream within the making for some time,” Brodin advised the Monetary Occasions. “We’re in a spot in Ikea the place we will do extra superior and funky stuff. There may be an unbelievable confidence within the firm evolving on digital.”
The brand new market is a part of a transformation at Ikea over the previous few years because it strikes from being an out-of-town retailer the place prospects have to select up and construct their very own furnishings to a enterprise providing on-line gross sales, city-centre shops and providers akin to meeting.
Ikea has had a small providing underneath which it buys used furnishings from prospects and resells it in retailer. However the brand new platform is extra formidable, aiming to deal with the secondhand marketplace for prospects promoting instantly to one another — an space the place Brodin estimates Ikea has a better market share than in new furnishings gross sales.
Prospects enter their product, their very own footage and a promoting value whereas Ikea’s personal synthetic intelligence-enabled database brings in its personal promotional photographs and measurements. The customer collects the furnishings instantly from the vendor, who has the choice of receiving cash or a voucher from Ikea with a 15 per cent bonus.
“Fairly often there’s a monopoly or oligopoly on platforms that function,” stated Brodin, speaking about eBay or digital categorized advert providers akin to Gumtree within the UK and Finn in Norway. Finn has 8,700 gadgets from Ikea listed in Oslo alone. Early choices on Ikea Preowned embody massive gadgets akin to sofas for as much as €600 and wardrobes for €450 in addition to smaller gadgets akin to a rest room roll holder for €4.
Listings are free however Brodin stated Ikea might finally cost “a symbolic payment, a humble payment”.
He added: “We’re going to confirm the complete scope together with the economics. If lots of people use the supply to get a reduction with Ikea — it’s a great way to reconnect with prospects. I’m very curious. I feel it makes enterprise sense.”
Ikea has beforehand examined promoting its new furnishings on third-party platforms akin to Alibaba’s Tmall in China, however the Preowned platform marks its first foray into secondhand marketplaces. It additionally dovetails with the retailer’s want to turn into “round and local weather optimistic” by 2030.
The world’s largest retailer had a plan to roll out on-line purchasing worldwide inside three years in 2020 however the Covid-19 pandemic pushed it to speed up that to 6 weeks.
“That was a matter of survival for us,” Brodin stated. “We had been 100 per cent closed. The digital transformation saved us.”
He added that Ikea now needed to develop a platform that was “the go-to place for house furnishing”, of which {the marketplace} can be “one of the vital components”. Different components might embody providers, finance and residential planning in addition to purchasing, he added.
