Furniture retailing giant Ikea is bring in a radical change to the shopping experience of customers through anew app that would allow its customers to avoid going to Ikea stores and yet be able to visualize the products in reference to their own homes. This would eliminate the need for customers to take the trouble of visiting the self-service, out-of-town stores of the company.

This is a clear indication of a shift of the business strategy of the world’s biggest furniture retailer of trying to convince customers to its suburban stores and making it easier for them to shop for furniture online, said a report published by the news agency Reuters.

“It is a completely new experience,” Barbara Martin Coppola, chief digital officer at IKEA, said in an interview. “The app is combined with the store experience, with the online experience.”

France and the Netherlands would be the first markets for where the app would be rolled out and would be followed by its launch in the top eight markets of Ikea – including Germany, the United States and China – by the end of the current year.

This app would assist its users to virtually how their rooms would look adorned with Ikea furniture simply by putting in the dimensions of their rooms and selecting different tastes and life stages and then ordering the chosen product through the app.

Earlier in 2017, an app driven by augmented reality was launched by Ikea which helped customers to visualize how their rooms would look and was applicable for more than 2,000 products of the company. However that app did not allow customers to purchase products.

Currently, while carrying the full range of Ikea products, the main app of the company still displays the products isolation and all the app allows is to enable customers to add items to a shopping list which can be used a reference when they shop. Remote shopping is only possible through the website of the company.

The new app of Ikea would enable the company to try out downsizing its smaller downtown stores by stocking lesser range of products.

“People who go to the stores might want to access the full range of IKEA, and that is when digital innovations come in handy,” Martin Coppola said on the sidelines of the World Retail Congress earlier this month.

Customers would also be able to visualize how, for example, a chair looks in other textures or colors by simply pointing their phone at it using the app or be able to view how their room would look with similar products in the same range.

This measure and change of business tactics is being seen as its response to the steady growth of e-commerce platform ever since the role of chief executive of the Ingka Group, the owner of most IKEA stores, was taken over by Jesper Brodin in 2017.

(Adapted from Reuters.com)