// Ikea wants to begin offering furniture on third-party ecommerce sites
// CEO said Ikea is not in any talks with any rivals but it would like to be involved in this possibility
Ikea is looking at a potential launch of an online sales platform which will offer furniture not just from them, but also from competitors.
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Torbjorn Loof, the chief executive of parent company Inter Ikea, told the Financial Times that the furniture retailer is currently deciding on the details of its first test of selling on a third-party website such as Alibaba or Amazon.
Loof also told the Financial Times that there had to be something between Ikea’s official website and other sites such as Amazon.
“What are the opportunities between the dominating, big, global platforms, and the company website? I think there are tons of opportunities. Like Zalando: they’re a kind of platform for fashion and clothes. I think it’s a very interesting area to explore,” Loof said.
Loof said Ikea was not in any talks with any of its competitors but it would like to be involved in the possibility of any industry-wide sales platform.
The concept of leasing furniture and selling it on other websites to offering home assembly to its customers is part of Ikea’s global turnaround scheme, first announced late last year.
Loof said Alibaba and Amazon had different models and highlighted the former’s Tmall “a shop-in-shop, more like a shopping centre”.
“We wanted to see and test and learn — to say: could this be something for us? For a specific part of the range or in specific types of markets?” he told Financial Times.
Inter Ikea owns the brand and concept behind Ikea, and Loof said he expects routes to online sales to establish soon.
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