IKEA is trialling its own second-hand online marketplace so customers can sell to each other instead of relying on buy-and-sell sites such as eBay or Gumtree.
IKEA Second Hand Homes is already up and running in Madrid and Oslo, and the Swedish furniture giant plans to launch the site globally in December.
This comes against a backdrop of steady growth in the market for second-hand furniture, clothes and equipment.
The incentive will align with IKEA’s sustainability goals by reusing items so they don’t end up in landfill. It will also help the company make more profits from reselling its own merchandise.
“After December, we will evaluate and decide our next steps. We are starting with Oslo and Madrid, but we are aiming higher,” a spokesman said.
The sale of used IKEA furniture is very popular on online marketplaces including Craigslist.
A search for “IKEA” on eBay, an online auction site that specializes in resale but also sells new items, turns up more than 25,000 results.
A search for the retailer on Gumtree in the UK showed more than 10,000 results, while Shpock and Facebook Marketplace, which specialize in local resale, also returned dozens of pages of results.
In the past, environmentalists have called out furniture manufacturers for piling up large amounts of plastic in the environment, harming marine wildlife. The problem is exacerbated by an onslaught of cheap furniture sales, which encourages people to simply throw away furniture they don’t need because it’s too cheap to buy new items.
Green campaigners have stressed the importance of a circular economy, which aims to reuse items multiple times. If a company is responsible for the resale of its own products, there may be a built-in incentive to make the products more durable, less disposable, and thus more sustainable.
Developing its own online marketplace would also allow IKEA to focus less on bricks-and-mortar stores (which are expensive and have high operating costs) and more on the growing areas of online sales and assembly services.
Listings on IKEA Used Products are posted by sellers, and IKEA’s algorithms generate detailed information about the items, including dimensions and original retail price.
The company already offers the sale of second-hand goods in some of its stores.
