> some items just cannot be bought online for no clear reason

I think there's a pretty clear reason. During normal circumstances, those items are not sold online, because they specifically WANT you to go to a warehouse. If you're looking for a couch or a table, it doesn't matter than much, that's deliberate shopping. The smaller items, those lead to impulse purchases.

Even tried going to Ikea to just get a frying pan, or a bath mat? You'll end up buying 10 more items, because: Hey, it's cheap, and the drive was 30 minutes the wrong way, might as well stock up.

That doesn't explain why I can buy single coat hangers online, but not single spatulas.

> (...) You'll end up buying 10 more items

This is also sort of a meme. I have taken trips to IKEA maybe 30 times in my life, and I walked out of there with exactly what was on my shopping list (or less, because the items sucked or were out of stock) 95% of the time.

You should try Spatula City!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE&ab_channel=Movie...

It probably depends on the person. I for one never leave IKEA without having bought something I hadn't even thought about beforehand.

I feel cheated if i don't impulse buy something. :p

IKEA's online shopping even sucks in Sweden, with shipping being expensive or online ordering unavailable for many products. Honestly their rate if innovation kinda sucks outside their narrow field of expertise (huge furniture warehouses). Like, they have for decades been discussing offering small stores to sell everyday necessities to customers who can't or won't travel to their warehouses outside the cities, but nothing has come out of it.

On the US site I can’t even log in and view my orders. I have to paste in the order number. I also noticed my “IKEA family” login doesn’t work at the normal IKEA login page which makes me think it’s two distinct systems with some kind of federation. It’s bizarre and I can only imagine the legacy cruft and/or dysfunction that led to this.

If this is how bad it looks from the outside I can only imagine what it’s like working there.

It seems like something is maybe starting to happen with the small city store idea - in NYC, IKEA already has a pretty normal-sized store in a relatively industrial area of Brooklyn, but recently opened an experimental small-format store in Queens and has a really small-format store in Manhattan.

They're headquartered in the Netherlands and it sucks here as well. Their operations are not optimised for a high volume of online orders and their website does a really poor job of handling that.

Also anecdotal: needed some small items from there (because it matches what I've already got) and their click and collect in Berlin was super well done. You could order to pick up the next day.

They had converted their entrance and exit "lobbies" in to a zone where carts of items were prepped and after they confirm your order they'd just roll the cart with your order out of the door and leave you to take it from there.

Obviously you have to be prepared for heavier items, etc, but it was fast.

That said, I had some less urgent stuff to get, and ordered online, took 3 weeks to even process/ship (though i knew that in advance)

> Shipping options disappear and reappear randomly when refreshing the shopping cart

I got saved by this not long ago. Needed a fridge the next day after moving into a new apartment. Was prepared to spend the day cycling to IKEA, buy the fridge and rent a car, get it all the way home, deliver the car and bike back. But then the website borked and let me choose next day express carry inside for 0,- saving me the trouble of carrying the fridge up stairs, renting a car etc.

The site is horrible and their phones are not being taken because they have too many calls here in DK. I'm not going to use IKEA unless I strictly have to based on the experiences I had during the last few months.

Also, don't make the mistake of trying to call for a return. IKEA US had a 3+ hour long wait for the phones.

the online shopping isn't the best, but then with the current lockdown in germany you can do click&collect and get your stuff in the parking garage... still kinda sad they still charge 10€ extra for that (instead of 15 during normal times), but then it worked flawlessly and the stuff was ready for pickup the next day.

still limited to things available in the local ikea, you can not mix "online" available and local available stuff...