IKEA’s app to offer a new shopping experience online and on mobile.
Until now, IKEA mobile shopping hasn’t be a part of the Swedish retailer’s app experience. The focus of its initial application has been on enhancing the retail experience while still requiring consumers to shop in store.
The new app combines the store experience with the online experience.
The new IKEA mobile shopping app has been designed to allow users to visualize how the store’s product would look in their homes and can then buy these product through the app.
More specifically, app users can input the room dimensions into the app and can then select products from different tastes and life stages. Any products that they like and wish to purchase they can then buy directly via the app.
“It is a completely new experience. The app is combined with the store experience, with the online experience,” Barbara Martin Coppola, chief digital officer at IKEA, told Reuters in an interview.
This isn’t the first time IKEA has given customers the chance to view how its products would look in their homes. Back in 2017, QR Code Press reported that the world’s biggest furniture retailer launched an augmented reality app that allowed the app users to see how more than 2,000 items would fit into their homes, office, etc.
The IKEA mobile shopping app will be released first in Europe before launching in the US.
The new app, which will release first in France, is expected to complement the company’s move to trial smaller IKEA stores in downtown areas where the size of a large box store cannot be accommodated. These smaller stores will offer a narrow range of products, like the store that opened up at the beginning of May in Paris.
“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.
At these smaller IKEA stores, consumers with the shopping app can point their phone at a product. For instance, a chair, to see what it looks like in other textures and colors. It also allows them to see the chair in the context of a room or what it might look like together with similar products in the same range.
After France, the IKEA mobile shopping app will be launched in the Netherlands. It will then be rolled out across the 
retail giant’s top eight markets, including Germany, the United States and China. The apps should be available in IKEA’s top eight markets by the end of 2019.
