Furniture giant to pilot second-hand online market

Ikea is trialling its own second-hand online marketplace so that customers can sell to each other, rather than relying on buy-and-sell websites like eBay or Gumtree.

Ikea Preowned is already up and running in Madrid and Oslo, with the Swedish furniture giant planning to roll out the site globally by December.

It comes against the backdrop of a steadily growing market for second-hand furniture, clothes and equipment.

The incentive would fit Ikea’s sustainability aims by reusing items so they don’t end up in landfill. It would also help the firm make more profit from the resale of its own goods.

“After December we will evaluate and decide on the next steps. We start in Oslo and Madrid, yet our ambition is higher”, a spokesperson said.

Sales of used Ikea furniture are very popular on online marketplaces including Craigslist.

Upwards of 25,000 results appear when searching “Ikea” on eBay, an online auction site that specialises in resale but also sells new items.

On Gumtree in the UK, over 10,000 results are shown when searching for the retailer, while Shpock and Facebook Marketplace, both specialising in local resales, also returns dozens of pages of results.

In the past, environmentalists have called out furniture makers for the huge amount of plastic that builds up in the environment, harming marine wildlife. The problem is exacerbated by the onslaught of cheap furniture sales which encourage people to simply throw out furniture they don’t want, as it is so cheap to buy new items.

Green campaigners have stressed the importance of a circular economy, where the aim is to reuse things more than once. If a company is responsible for the resale of its own products, then there could be an in-built incentive to make items more durable, less disposable, and therefore more sustainable.

Evolving its own online marketplace would also allow Ikea to focus less on its brick-and-mortar stores – which are expensive with high operating costs – and more towards the growing sector of online sales and assembling services.

Listings on Ikea Preowned are put up by the seller, and Ikea’s algorithms generate the details of the item including measurements and the original retail price.

The firm already offers, in some of its stores, a service where it sells pre-owned items.