Filling the E-Commerce Gap

Ikea's slow roll-out of online shopping in the UK is going pretty well - their test area in the East Midlands is already the 49th largest etail store in the UK (as reported by Hitwise and InternetRetailing.net).

The result of this might be that the likes of Flatpack Brighton from whom I ordered a 2-seater Klippan and some lamps recently, may have trouble surviving. but their service is good. My nearest Ikea is in Croydon and I have no car/van, for a reasonable fee they delivered my Klippan sofa. 3 weeks later it basically snapped in half, but that's for another post...

There is a latent demand in the UK for Ikea to deliver online point of sale services. The strong brand already pervades social networks including FlickR, YouTube, Digg & MySpace where a wealth of multimedia content can be found. There are useful, useless and amusing snippets of information & entertainment that if shared, aggregated and optimised become marketing capital.