Ikea is considering offering a marketplace of third-party products through its site

Ikea is thinking of starting a marketplace where third parties can offer their products. The company wants to sell its own products on a third-party platform to explore the possibilities for such a platform.

Ikea has the size and capabilities to launch such a platform, according to the company’s CEO. “I think we’ll see what we now call the platform evolve over the next five to ten years,” Ikea CEO Torbjorn Loof told the Financial Times. According to him, there are possibilities between on the one hand the large ‘dominant’ providers of many products such as Amazon and Alibaba and on the other hand simply their own site.

Loof mentions Zalando as an example, which he sees as a platform for fashion and clothing. Ikea is about to conduct its own testing, delivering its products through a third-party site. “We wanted to see it and test it and learn it, to be able to say if it’s for us, for a specific part of the offer or specific markets,” Loof says. He hints that the test will not run through Amazon.

It is not known whether Ikea wants to focus exclusively on furniture with a possible marketplace or on more product segments. For example, the company is also active in the market for smart home products with the Trådfri series and is releasing a WiFi speaker together with Sonos.