During my first visit to Ikea Philippines, my main goal was to purchase an eight-seater dining table. Prior to Ikea’s opening, I already visited quite a number of department stores, furniture stores, even the ones online, but was not able to find one that fits our theme and budget. When Ikea’s online shop opened, I browsed through their website and found about three tables that fit what I had in mind for our home. So prior to visiting the massive store, I already have screenshots ready of the ones I’m interested in.
As part two of my Ikea Philippines post, below is the detailed steps, as well as some tips on shopping for furniture. For my full Ikea experience and tips, you may check out my post here. I did not intend to post a blog about the experience as my intention was to limit my stay in the store. So pardon for not having so much photos or videos. 🙂
From the store entrance, the furniture showroom on the 4th floor is the first thing that you will see, next to some room inspirations. Upon seeing the furniture, what you will immediately notice is that aside from the price tags, items have either any of these colored tail or sticker tags:
a. Yellow – means that these items are for delivery, and
b. Red – the ones that you will get from the Self-Serve area, pay and bring home
Although some non-furniture items have red tags, which indicates that you can get stocks from the Market Hall area of the store located at the 3rd floor.
Furniture for delivery
Items with yellow tags are for big furniture, like beds and tables. If the item that you like has a yellow tag on it:
1.Approach an Ikea staff – They will prepare a Sales Invoice (SI) for you, which will be presented to the cashier upon payment.
2. The SI will include the delivery fee – The Ikea staff will ask for your delivery details and once they have your complete address, they will give you a quote on the delivery fee. They will also confirm your availability to receive the item on the earliest delivery date or if you prefer a different date. In our case, delivery date was six days after date of purchase, which is not that bad.
3. Assembly fee, is available as an option, but very pricey – Ikea charges an assembly fee per item. For an 8-seater dining table, we were charged Php2,700+, and when we added 2 chairs, it reached more than Php3,000. If you have the time and patience, you will be able to save some money by purchasing an electric screwdriver (which Ikea also sells for a reasonable price), then assemble the furniture yourself.
If you opted to avail of their assembly services, they will also provide you earliest available assembly date. In our case it was a day after delivery date.
4. Note that the SI is not final unless you pay for it. – With that said, if it happens to be the last available stock, there is a possibility it can be invoiced to two or more customers on the same day, then whoever pays first will get the item. It happened to me
. I initially have 5 items invoiced. But when the cashier scanned the SI barcode, it was invalid. Why? Because two of the items were sold to the other customer and they have no stocks left for me. It was honestly a hassle and frustrating but then, what can I do right?
Self-Serve Area
If a furniture has a red tail tag, it means that you will get its stock from the Self-Serve Area which is located at the further end of the 3rd floor near the cashier and exit. Some shopping notes below may be of help to you:
a. Before dashing the leave the showroom to get the furniture, take a photo of the item and the tag. Ensure that your photo clearly shows the product name, color, rack number and section number. Once you get to the 3rd floor going back is a hassle because customers are not allowed to go back up the 4th floor with a shopping cart full of items.
Now, some customers do ask the Ikea showroom staff to check from the system if stocks are available in the Self-Serve Area, HOWEVER, even if they answer yes, it is not an assurance that you will still be able to get hold of one by the time you get there. Currently, with the high volume of shoppers, there is a chance that it will be sold out by the time you get to the section shelf. My suggestion: have an option B, but it has to be something that you like equally as your first option. Otherwise, do not force yourself to buy something just because your first choice has run out.
2. Once you get to the Self Serve Area, grab a trolley and go to the shelf number indicated in the tag. These are the big numbers that you will see from the aisles.
3. In the shelf, look for the section number. You should see boxes of your item in mind. Carefully check the code number and item color to ensure that you have the one that you intend to buy.
4. After getting all your purchases from the Self- Service racks, you may proceed to the cashier together with your shopping cart/s. Lucky you if there is no line!
If stocks run out by the time you get to the section shelves, you may opt to line up at the “i” counter to check if either: (a) there are still stocks on standby that they can get for you, or (b) all out for the day but can be ordered from their warehouse and have it delivered to you. Again, this happened to me as only 4 chairs are available in the section shelf. The remaining 4 they were able to get for me from the warehouse stocks. So they updated my SI to add 4 chairs for delivery together with the tables. Lucky for me that my 20minutes of standing in line (yes, the waiting time is quite long considering I was 4th in line) did not go in vain. Others were not as lucky.
Now you may ask, what if from the 4th floor showroom, you want to have an item delivered to your home but has a red tag on it? Like in my case, since the table (with yellow tag) that I ordered is for delivery, I was hoping that I can also have the 8 chairs delivered to make the most out of the delivery fee. Sadly, the showroom staff can not include these in the SI because the chairs are meant to be taken by the customers from the Self-Serve area, unless the rack run out of stocks. If I want to include it in the delivery, I would have to go to the Self-Serve Area first, get the items, then line up at the Customer Service area to ask the staff to update my SI from the 4th floor showroom to include the chairs for delivery. Confusing, right? I know. I was on the verge of losing it too because of all these procedures hahaha! But thankfully, the staff are really nice and patient. As a customer it felt good to see how they empathize with the customers’ frustrations and tried their very best to help us out. “Us” because I saw how they all tried to address the concerns of a number of customers.
I hope I did not confuse you with the details but if you were, I can not blame you because I got confused too when I was there, hahaha!
As this has been Ikea’s procedure all over the world, I figured that it will need just getting used to. After all, when I think about it; the expensive assembly fee, limited products with delivery options, encouragement of customer self-serve steps, etc., it all made sense to me, and when it did, it became less frustrating.
By the way, as of posting date of this blog, our dining table and chairs were already delivered and assembled as scheduled! Their personnel arrived within the timeframe specified in the Sales Invoice! Impressive! They assembled everything quickly.
Overall, the whole Ikea furniture shopping experience was not that smooth, but understandable. At least I was able to get what I needed (mostly). I personally feel that once the hype is over and there are less customers shopping at the same time, it will be a better shopping experience for everyone. The major plus points for me is really the Ikea staff and punctuality of delivery and assembly.
Have you been to Ikea? How was it? Were you satisfied with the items that you bought?