IKEA
Commerce, AR · 2017 to now · 8 min
Selling the thing you cannot imagine
IKEA Place did not make furniture easier to browse. It removed the one doubt that stops people buying furniture online.
Furniture is one of the hardest categories to sell online, and the reason is not price or delivery. It is doubt. Will it fit, and will it look wrong in my room?
Photography cannot answer either question, because the answer depends on a room the retailer has never seen.
IKEA Place, launched in 2017 on Apple's ARKit, put the sofa in your living room at true scale. It is a useful teardown because the feature is not the technology, it is the doubt it removes.
Scroll. The screen on the right changes as each beat arrives, and the callouts land on the part being discussed. Every beat names the principle underneath it, which is the bit that transfers to your product.
The two questions a product page cannot answer
A grid of sofas answers what they cost and what they look like against a white background. Neither is the thing stopping the purchase.
The real objection is specific and personal: my room, my wall, my light, my other furniture. Until it is answered the tab stays open and nothing happens.
Most teams respond to this by adding more photos. That is optimising the part that was already fine.
- 1More angles do not answer will it fit.
- 2The whole purchase hangs on a question the page cannot reach.
The step people abandon is rarely the step that failed. Look one question upstream from the drop.
Put it in the room, at true scale
The camera becomes the product page. The sofa sits on your floor, at the size it actually is, and you walk around it.
The detail that matters is scale accuracy. IKEA said at launch it was rendering products at around 98 percent accurate scale, because a sofa that is nearly the right size answers nothing.
Everything else in the interface gets out of the way. Two controls, one price, one action.
- 1True scale. A near enough sofa answers nothing.
- 2Price and action stay on screen, because this is still commerce.
Do not describe the answer on another page. Resolve the doubt inside the moment it occurs.
Technology is the delivery mechanism. The product decision was choosing which single doubt to kill.
Carry the certainty into the purchase
The last move is the easy one to skip. Having answered the doubt, say so where the money is.
A line that reminds the buyer they measured it themselves is worth more than another review. They are not trusting the retailer, they are trusting their own eyes.
It also sets up the part nobody sees on the product page: fewer returns, because fewer people are guessing.
- 1The proof, restated at the point of payment.
- 2Returns are a design outcome, not a logistics problem.
Evidence gathered earlier in a flow should appear again at the moment of commitment.
- 1More angles do not answer will it fit.
- 2The whole purchase hangs on a question the page cannot reach.
What transfers to your product.
Name the single doubt that stops the purchase, then design against that one thing.
Do not start from the technology. AR here is an answer, and it is only the answer for categories where placement is the doubt.
Get the boring detail right. Scale accuracy is the whole feature.
Do not leave the certainty behind in the tool. Carry it into the checkout.
Measure it on returns and on conversion together, since one can hide the other.
Do not judge it on installs. A tool used once per purchase is not a daily active product.
Public commentary, written without involvement from IKEA. The screens are drawings made for this teardown, not screenshots, and nothing internal is claimed.
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