Case Study: IKEA Wedding List System

When IKEA wanted to introduce and promote an automated Wedding List System in their stores, they chose software & web development experts DCSL to produce a leading-edge application.

Benefits at a glance

> Incremental business for IKEA
Streamlining the wedding list process for customers has brought IKEA significant incremental business from those wedding guests’ tours of the store.

> Enhanced experience for wedding list shoppers
With wedding list items marked as purchased or not, and the in-store locations of available items noted, the shopping process is simplified and made more enjoyable.

> Reduced pressure on staff to answer queries
The extension of the ‘kiosk’ concept to answer pricing queries relieves store staff of the need to respond to these questions.

Background

IKEA is probably the world’s best-known retailer of home furnishings and products. With 90,000 employees in 44 countries selling 9,500 articles, IKEA turned over 14.8 billion euros in the year to 31st August 2005, with 11% of those sales being made in the UK.

Challenge

IKEA wanted to introduce an automated Wedding List System, in order to facilitate their customers’ wedding list shopping, and to encourage incremental purchases by these visitors.

Selection

The Bristol branch of IKEA found the DCSL website through Google Adwords, and an initial meeting was arranged. Following this, DCSL created a detailed specification of the system, which was presented at a subsequent meeting, prior to their selection to produce the full application.

This specification remained constant throughout the development and implementation of the system – testament to DCSL’s quick and thorough understanding of IKEA’s requirements.

The Solution

The system allows couples to visit the store and, together with an IKEA Wedding List representative, create a Wedding List. This list is then made accessible via instore kiosks and the Internet to wedding guests.

When guests visit the store, they can print an up-to-date copy of the wedding list, detailing the items that have already been bought and the instore locations of the remaining articles.

From the outset, an essential part of IKEA’s requirement was that customers would have to visit a store in order to buy from the Wedding Lists. By actually visiting and walking round a store, the customers are inspired to make other purchases – incremental business for IKEA – and the calculation of this extra revenue was to be a key measurement of the success of the system.

Another stipulation was that the Wedding List System should not directly access the internal IKEA database. DCSL developed a sophisticated import utility to accommodate this requirement, thus delivering the new system the data it needed.

Future Plans

The success of the Wedding List System, and in particular DCSL’s proven ability to import data from IKEA internal systems, opened the door to further utilisation of that data.

One further application for this data was immediately identified. Some items in the Marketplace section of IKEA stores do not carry prices, leading to customer frustration and a drain on employee time. DCSL was commissioned to develop a Kiosk system, similar to the Wedding List Kiosk, that would allow customers to check items’ prices quickly for themselves.

DCSL selected the unique MicroKiosk™ from manufacturer Symbol for the facility itself, and developed a system that includes a barcode scanner, so that customers could simply wave the item in front of the Kiosk and have the item’s identity, location and price confirmed on-screen.

Whatever future applications may be developed, the Wedding List System, conceived by IKEA and realised by DCSL, has already more than paid for itself in incremental business, and has proved to be a match made in heaven!