My Nightmare Trying To Buy Some Kitchen Items From Ikea
Customer Disservice. Maybe Ikea Should Hire Shopify To Process Their On-Line Sales
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
I buy almost everything on Amazon. It is fast, easy, reliable, responsive. I love shopping on-line on Amazon.
But Amazon has spoiled me. They’ve showed the world how to do it right for so long that I thought that by now every large, long-established retailer, Ikea for example, would have copied their mechanics for fulfilling an on-line order.
Silly me. I was so very wrong.
You Can’t Get An Ikea Account Without A Cell Phone
It all started with a planned early Christmas present for my long-time girlfriend. She wanted a new kitchen island and a couple of bar stools to go with it. We found the perfect products at my local Ikea. I wrote down the item numbers and went on line to place the order for delivery to her home.
First, I needed to sign up for an account on Ikea. Email, password, OK, same old, same old. But then I got to the “Mobile Phone” field on the form. A required field. You cannot buy anything on-line from Ikea unless you give them a cell phone number that they verify.
Sadly, Ikea’s clueless employees have assumed that all people and all businesses only use cell phones. The truth is that tens of millions of American businesses and homes use land lines — Hello.
Land lines are great because the calls are answered by a base station and then transmitted to four, five or six handsets scattered around the house. You can both make calls and answer calls anywhere in your house without the constant “Where did I leave my cell?” nonsense.
I do have a cell phone, but it’s for emergencies. I keep it turned off in my car’s glove box.
I know Ikea wants my phone number so that the delivery people can contact the recipient if there is a problem with the delivery, but why does it have to be a cell phone? Why aren’t my email and my land-line phone number good enough for them?
If I gave them my emergency cell number and if the delivery was going to be to my home, I would never get the message because my cell is turned off and sitting in my glove box. And since the delivery is to her home, what they really need is the recipient’s phone number, not the purchaser’s number.
Of course, what Ikea should have done was have a radio button beneath the “Phone Number” box with the choices “Mobile Phone” or “Land Line.”
If you selected “Mobile” then it would be verified by sending you a numeric text and if you checked “Land line” it would be verified by a voice call where a robot would speak the verifying number.
But Ikea never thought of that. Use a cell phone or get lost. So, I gave Ikea her cell number. The form had a “Verify” button but I skipped that for now because she was at work and I didn’t want to bother her.
Ikea Will Not Accept Payment By Credit Card If The Shipping Address Is Different From The Billing Address
The next problem was that Ikea’s purchase system assumes that the purchaser’s name and the purchaser’s billing address will always be the same as the recipient’s name and the recipient’s shipping address.
Amazon will let you store ten or twenty different delivery names and addresses so that you can buy items on Amazon and have them shipped directly to your intended recipient.
Apparently gift purchases where the buyer’s name and the buyer’s billing address are different from the recipient’s name and the recipient’s shipping address do not happen in Ikea World.
Strange.
My Five Day Struggle To Complete The Purchase
Since I was the purchaser with my billing address and she was the recipient with her shipping address, Ikea’s payment system totally choked on processing my payment.
My VISA card was rejected with the worthless message: “Something went wrong. Try again with a different payment method.”
I tried again with a different VISA card. This time the system briefly flashed a message that I needed to call a number to verify my identity, but that number disappeared from the screen before I could write it down, never to reappear.
I tried twice more to make the purchase without success.
I chatted with Ikea customer service and they promised to get back to me with a fix within 24 hours. I never heard from them again.
The next day I called Ikea and got a human. She told me that after the third “something went wrong” message Ikea had locked me out of their system entirely, and I could not buy ANYTHING for the next two days. Talk about customer service! She told me to try again in two days.
Two days later I tried again without success. I called customer service again. This time the agent said that the problem was that the dreaded cell phone verification had not been completed.
I clicked the Verify button. It sent a code to my girl friend’s phone. She called me back with the code. I entered it into my account sign-in form and we completed the verification. The agent told me to try again the next day, and he was sure it would work.
It didn’t.
Back to customer service for a fourth time. This agent told me that the customer service agents all knew that “something” was wrong with Ikea’s credit-card payment system, but they weren’t sure what. She said that the system had been broken for at least two years.
She assured me that PayPal always worked. I just had to forget VISA and use PayPal. Luckily, I had a PayPal account and I had previously linked that PayPal account to one of my bank accounts that had enough money in it to cover the purchase.
I selected PayPal from the purchase options and the sale was immediately completed. Yeah! I thought all my Ikea problems were over. No, not by a long shot.
Out Of Stock — Purchase Cancelled
Ikea sent me an email stating that the order, a kitchen island and two bar stools, would be delivered on a certain day, but they weren’t.
When the truck showed up it only delivered the island. The bar stools were MIA.
Ikea then sent an email saying “We delivered your order” but that delivery confirmation email only showed the island. There was no mention of the bar stools.
Another call to Ikea customer service.
“I’m sorry, we ran out of stock on the bar stools,” the agent told me, “but we will have them soon. We will ship them to you at no additional cost.”
Great. But it wasn’t.
A few minutes later I received another email from Ikea. This one informed me that the bar stools were out of stock and that my order for them had been cancelled. I would get a refund in seven to ten business days.
Cancelled? I don’t want the order cancelled! I want the bar stools.
Still Trying To Get The Bar Stools
ANOTHER call to Ikea customer service. After I explained the problem this agent told me that the system had automatically cancelled my order as soon as it figured out that the bar stools were out of stock, and there was nothing he could do to reverse the cancellation, but he could re-order the bar stools for me.
I told him that I didn’t want to pay a second delivery charge on top of the delivery charge I had already paid for the bar stools. No problem, he said.
Re-Ordered Again, Had To Pay Again
He processed a refund for the delivery charge for the island and bar stools, and he placed a new order for the bar stools. Apparently, they were in stock in a different Ikea store and they would be delivered in only 5 days.
But I had to pay for them a second time because the old order had been cancelled and this was a new order. Apparently the credit Ikea had promised me for the cancelled order could not be applied to this purchase.
He urged me to use my credit card to complete the re-purchase.
I told him it wouldn’t work, but he said it would. Of course, he was wrong.
Another “Something went wrong. Use a different payment method” message appeared preceded for a few seconds by the disappearing phone number that I needed to call to verify my purchase.
Back to PayPal. The payment for the new bar stools order went through.
Almost There
A few minutes later I received another email from Ikea. Yes, my bar stools order had been received and they would be delivered in five days. The agent had provided that there would be no delivery charge on the second bar stools order. Good.
And the whole episode only took SIX DAYS and probably three or four hours of my time.
After all this turmoil I was mystified how Ikea’s management could be so incompetent. Are they hiring their idiot brothers-in-law to manage their on-line-purchase division? Hasn’t anyone there ever bought anything on Amazon?
How could such a large, established company so screw up such common commercial tasks that are seamlessly performed hundreds of thousands of times every day by thousands of other merchants?
I bet that web sites managed by Shopify don’t malfunction this way. Maybe Ikea should hire them to process their customers’ orders.
NOTE: I sent a draft of this column to Ikea’s VP Of Customer Service Operations at their U.S. headquarters in Pennsylvania but never received a reply. Draw your own conclusions from that.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)