IKEA has now started shipping to Bengaluru as well, with the city’s pincodes showing up as deliverable on the company’s website. Deliveries are priced at Rs 499 upto 12 kg. This comes soon after IKEA decided to launch its app. So far, Ikea’s products were available in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Surat, and Baroda.
While Ikea is yet to make an official statement about opening up online delivery to Bengaluru, it wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “Sorry too awestruck by the Bengaluru weather, forgot what we were about to tweet!”
Sorry too awestruck by the Bengaluru weather, forgot what we were about to tweet!
— IKEAIndia (@IKEAIndia) June 15, 2021
IKEA India opened its first retail store in Hyderabad in August 2018, followed by online stores in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune in 2019. The second store in India opened at Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, in December 2020.
IKEA said its app, which it launched in the last week of May, would have features including product recommendations, ratings, and reviews, along with easier searching and browsing experience. It said that users feed will be personalised as well. The app also allows customer to add the products to their shopping list even while physically browsing through the products in the store. The app will offer 7,000 home furnishing products, along with home ideas, product recommendations and personalization options, it had said.
This move to open up online ordering to Bengaluru comes as IKEA continues its expansion plans despite the pandemic hampering timelines. This includes an IKEA store that is currently under construction in the city.
“Importance of India as a country and expansion plans will not change due to short-term setbacks related to the pandemic. Some construction schedules in some markets are impacted because of the pandemic. We are hoping to be able to make up for some of the time. But one has to look at the long-term perspective and that is about presence in markets like Mumbai or Bengaluru, which we will continue to work towards and are very committed to,” country manager Kavitha Rao told CNBC TV18.
In September 2020, IKEA had said that it was opening a new office in Bengaluru within the areas of global business operations, digital and centres of expertise. This global business operations (GBO) office, IKEA had said, is a key partner for functions such as finance, procurement, digital and others.
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