IKEA Germany: Matching customers to the right store for their needs, with Google Maps Platform

In 1943, a 17-year-old boy started a mail-order business selling pens, picture frames, and other household goods around his farm in the south of Sweden. 77 years later, Ingvar Kamprad’s IKEA brand is the largest and most valuable furniture retailer in the world, welcoming almost one billion customers in 2019.

In line with its motto, “creating a better everyday life for many,” IKEA updated its global web presence in 2019 to improve the customer experience both on and offline. This project brought visible changes to the design and organization of content displayed on IKEA’s customer-facing ecommerce website. A single template, provided by IKEA’s global office to all national offices, ensured that customers shopping in any country would be able to enjoy the same enhanced experience. Behind the scenes, each IKEA national office would be responsible for running and updating its own website’s back end.

With 53 stores across the country, IKEA Germany is the brand’s largest market in retail revenue. When the company received the global website template, it identified an opportunity to give German customers a more seamless experience and drive more online visitors to its stores. The idea? A store locator application to improve the online visibility of its many stores, so that customers could find them offline more easily. To bring this idea to life, and to improve all its digital touch points along the way, IKEA Germany partnered with Google Maps Platform.

Delivering more ease of use for customers and employees

To integrate a set of Google Maps Platform functionalities in its new website, IKEA Germany partnered with IT consultancy maplicate, a Google Cloud Premier Partner whose expertise includes software implementation and web development. Together, they developed and implemented a store locator solution tailored for IKEA Germany, called Omnichannel Cloud, in less than a year. The solution is based on Google Maps Platform and supported by Google Cloud.

“When searching for ‘IKEA’ online, it should be easy to find nearby stores, their correct opening times, and what product offerings and services they have. With Google Maps Platform, we can ensure that this kind of information is always clearly visible and up-to-date for customers, on whichever website they view,” says Christopher Riedel, Web and Digital Manager at IKEA Germany.

IKEA Germany’s new website, launched in March 2019, features an interactive map supported by the Maps JavaScript API, which displays the locations of all 53 German stores and offers an overview of each one, including their opening times and the links to their own web pages. The Directions API and Distance Matrix API enable website visitors to see which stores are nearest to them and the best ways to get there. Meanwhile, each product page helps customers prepare for a store visit by displaying the location nearest to them, and showing if a particular product is in stock.

Due to the global website project, IKEA Germany was able to decentralize certain functionalities from its central website management to local store page managers, allowing them to focus on locally relevant content. This way, store page managers can easily update information such as local offers and services, providing visitors with even more incentives to visit their nearby stores in person. The company uses Google Maps Platform to make the most of this new capability.

Fariss Tajjiou, Performance Marketing at IKEA Germany, explains the impact that this decentralization has had on internal processes and on German customers: “The out-of-the-box global website had one web front end, which didn’t separate access rights for stores and service offices. This means that to change anything, you’d need access to the content management system, or CMS, and only then would you be able to edit everything,” he explains. “By implementing specific access rights for each store page, and partnering with Google Maps Platform to make the most of location functionalities, we created an opportunity for store pages to bring more relevance to customers around them.” Local editors can now add locally relevant offers and services on individual store pages, so customers can see what’s on sale in their nearest store, and promotions specific to their area.

IKEA Germany was careful to support this decentralization while maintaining cohesion across different touch points with customers. Backend functionalities of all store pages keep their information synchronized with the central IKEA Germany website and with Google My Business to ensure that they are always up-to-date and never contradict each other. “Someone looking for our opening times will find the same information on each store page, our central website, Google Maps, and Google Search. There’s no confusion,” says Riedel. “We used to have to update all these touch points separately. Now, our store locator does it automatically and instantaneously.”

Supporting customers wherever they are

Another driver for adopting advanced store locator solutions came from the need to support customers who are increasingly opting for a mobile online experience. With Places Library, the IKEA Germany website can search for stores in a defined area to help customers find nearby stores while on the go. Meanwhile Place Details enables IKEA Germany to embed richly detailed information such as addresses of stores, geographic coordinates, and whether it’s a showroom, mini store, or planning studio. “Now, with a more mature website and optimized location features, we’re much better able to focus on answering our customers’ questions quickly and helpfully,” says Riedel.

In the advent of online shopping, IKEA Germany sees its websites as a complement, not a competitor, to its stores. “One big part of our digital strategy is to prepare customers for their visits to the stores,” explains Riedel. “As a multichannel retailer with many different touch points online and 53 stores across the country, there are plenty of opportunities for our customers to find us. Google Maps Platform helps make that happen much faster and more conveniently,” says Riedel.

“Our digital strategy is all about giving our customers a smooth, seamless experience and the option to buy at IKEA whenever and wherever they want,” he adds. “Digital is at the core of everything we’re doing to keep improving everyday life for our customers, both online and in-store.”