Should you buy IKEA on Amazon? Depends where you live.
Much of IKEA's inventory is聽, and聽a lot of it is even eligible for free 2-day shipping聽via Amazon Prime. This seems like an incredible find at first glance, but is it actually聽a bargain?
The answer:聽It depends on whether or not you live near an IKEA store.聽
That聽conclusion was a lot harder to arrive at than it should have been,聽though, and I'm going to walk you through how this all breaks down.
Who is actually selling this stuff?
The first thing to understand is that while these are genuine IKEA brand items, they are not being sold on Amazon by IKEA. Here's an actual Amazon listing for a聽. I'm going to use this product listing as an example throughout this post.
In this case,聽you'd be buying this IKEA Flatware Set from a store聽called Windows 101.聽This is important because it explains why the pricing is so strange. Which brings me to my next point.
IKEA brand items are much priced higher聽at Amazon.
In fact, they're generally not even close. Let's look at our flatware set again.
A list price of $29.99 seems really high for IKEA, no? But it's only $13.99, and free shipping with Prime, and that seems a lot more reasonable.
But wait,聽.
Not only is that $29.99 original price that the third party seller claims on Amazon an obvious lie, but their price reduction is still higher than IKEA's聽actual original price of $8.99. And IKEA has even reduced the price beyond that.
So clearly going through IKEA is the better deal here. Right?
Well, not so fast.
But Amazon is still a better deal if you don't have access to an IKEA Store.
IKEA's achilles heel in ecommerce is that its shipping charges are pretty outrageous, especially in a world聽that increasingly expects free shipping when shopping online.
When I add聽that聽flatware set to my online shopping cart at IKEA,聽I'm hit with a $10 shipping fee.聽And that's for parcel post delivery, not even anything聽expedited like UPS or Fedex. That brings my total to $17.99, or $4 higher than the price on Amazon with Prime shipping.
So there you have it. If buying IKEA online is your聽only option, then聽Amazon is the better deal, even with dishonest disclosures from third party sellers with regard to聽original prices. But if you can drive to a store, then you're better off to skip聽buying聽online altogether.
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