IKEA's search and order kiosk

Does IKEA have no shelf space for slower-moving items in the self-service furniture area? My wife and I hadn’t seen this before, but a few items just say “Place your order for this product at the search and order kiosk or ask a co-worker”¹ instead of the usual row and shelf numbers.

We found the search and order kiosks in the self-service furniture area, right before checkout, surrounded by a lot of confused shoppers. The area was understaffed, and I felt bad for the two employees dealing with all the questions. It seems you aren’t able to pick up the furniture unless you pay for it separately. At first, I expected the machine to just look up where to find the furniture from the article number. The machines at the kiosk were not very helpful or descriptive. Also, our article number could not be found through the kiosk adding to the confusion.

After a long wait for our turn to talk to an employee, we were told we had to find and order the furniture on the machines and then pick it up outside, essentially reinventing click and collect but within the store. Yes, we did indeed have to make two payments: one for everything you picked in-store, which you pay for at the regular checkout, and the second for the furniture item you had to “order” through the search and order kiosk. Our other issue was that our article number didn’t exist on the kiosk; after explaining, the employee verified this was the case on one of the kiosk machines and manually created the invoice for us.²

Once you buy the item through the machine, you then have to go to the pickup/click-and-collect point in the parking garage and wait some more for your furniture to arrive. This seems very inefficient and un-IKEA-like.

Could it be the lack of shelf space or something more nefarious? Like driving up sales at the post-checkout Bistro?³ Or encouraging more people to shop online, thus allowing them to reduce staff in stores?

The search and order kiosks may be IKEA’s UPPTÄCKA self-service kiosks they boost about in a press release in June. They definitely look the same. The press release states:

Shoppers can use Upptäcka kiosks to locate desired items and, once ready to purchase, can continue their transaction on their personal devices. Upptäcka kiosks offer flexibility and convenience, significantly reducing waiting times and improving overall customer satisfaction.

Well, the first part seems to be true but counterintuitive to how you’d expect the customer journey to be for a store. You are essentially only paying for part of your shopping cart at the kiosk, only to have to go to a checkout again to pay for the rest, and then have to wait to pick up the order you purchased at the kiosk. The second part of the statement is not true, the wait times were longer, albeit spread out over three stages, and I would rate the satisfaction as worse.

Further in the press release, there’s a quote from the Product Owner:

The introduction of Upptäcka kiosks has shown promising results for IKEA so far. “We can now serve six times the number of customers compared to the previous one-to-one approach” according to Stojanka Karlsson, Product Owner for Upptäcka. This efficiency not only boosts customer satisfaction but also reallocates coworker resources more effectively, allowing them to spend more time with customers before they reach the tills.

Also wasn’t true from my experience. It seemed like the employees were swarmed by customers asking about payments and orders related to the kiosk more than anything else.

Not sure what to make of this bad experience, hope it gets better. At least we don’t go to IKEA often.