Ikea Agita

You know how excited most kids get when they race downstairs Christmas morning to see the heaps of garishly wrapped presents under the tree? That’s almost how excited I am when the Ikea mini-catalog insert arrives in our local newspaper.

Because we live within an hour’s ride of three Ikea stores, we receive these seasonal catalogs with our New York Times several times a year. Back in the days when I actually had spare time, they more often than not triggered a drive to one of the stores and a multihour spending spree.

This summer, though, I couldn’t carve out the time to make the trek to a store. So I figured I’d do what I usually do when shopping for anything other than groceries: jump online.

I’d tried to shop the Ikea Website last winter (yes, shortly after receiving a mini-catalog). I’d loaded several hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise into my shopping cart and headed to checkout…only to have the site freeze on me. I tried again. Another freeze. So determined was I that I tried on another computer. No go.

But hope springs eternal in the breast of a woman who’s convinced that a $99 coffee table will make her den complete. So I logged on to www.ikea.com and proceeded to shop.

Problem #1: Most of the products weren’t available online. You could read about them, click on enlarged photos of them, but you could buy them only in-store.

Problem #2: Even after I headed to the checkout and submitted my address and credit-card data, I wasn’t given information about the shipping fees. Instead I was told that shortly after my order was received at headquarters, Ikea would send me an e-mail with the exact total, including S&H, and that my credit card wouldn’t be billed unless I agreed to the amount.

Problem #3: The next morning I received an e-mail from Ikea, all right. But the e-mail didn’t include S&H information. “Due to a high volume of orders,” read the message, “we will contact you to confirm your order with the details about your delivery and total cost within 5-7 business days.”

At this rate I could build a coffee table myself before receiving one from Ikea.

Why am I reciting this tale of woe? Because it exemplifies some e-commerce worst practices: teasing site visitors with product that they can’t purchase in their channel of choice; failing to provide S&H information up front (and unacceptable S&H fees are a major cause of shopping-cart abandonment); taking days (three and counting) to respond to a customer with the information to close the sale.

And because maybe, just maybe, someone from Ikea is reading this and can help me get my coffee table in time for my next dinner party.

PS — If you read my previous editor’s letter, you may remember that I’d discussed how hard we’d labored on this year’s Catalog Age 100. Well, despite our hard work, a few snafus prevented us from printing the most updated version of the ranking in our Aug. 15 issue. As a result, we’d left off two companies (Hanover Direct and The Sportsman’s Guide) and understated the sales figures for two more (ABC Distributing and Guitar Center). The final, corrected version appears between pages 16 and 17 of this issue; it’s also available on our Website (www.CatalogAgemag.com) and in our Catalog Age 150 book. We regret the errors.