Hi there,
When I lived in Spain, I always bought directly at the Ikea store.
In Porto, the same day we bought the house, we went to Ikea to see the furniture I had previously selected.
I decided to buy it directly at Ikea thinking it was the cheapest I was going to find, but don’t think it is such a thing. If you research well, there are surely better options and, above all, better customer service.
We placed our first order online which included the bed, sofa, and dining set. Everything was to be delivered on a Tuesday.
It turns out that when they came, the sofa and a chair were missing.
Imagine that we had already been doing everything on the mattress for a week because we had nowhere else to sit.
The delivery people said that we would get a notification with the new delivery date and that day nothing arrived. We contacted customer service and they said they would deliver it in a couple of days, but we did not receive any notification.
Since we doubted that what we had been told in the chat was true, we went directly to the Matosinhos store to get confirmation that the delivery had been rescheduled for a couple of days.
It turned out that the delivery had been rescheduled for a month from that day and we spent two hours fighting with them to resolve the situation.
In the end, we had to wait another week.
And the missing chair arrived 2 months later.
No one apologized or offered any kind of compensation.
Normally, when companies make a mistake, they give you a Good Will Gesture. But it is clear in Portugal that does not exist.
Then we placed another order of various items, among which there were a couple of white towels. To my surprise, the towels arrived black with dirt.
We tried to refuse the delivery as we could have done with any normal company and the carrier refused. He said we had to accept the package and contact ikea for a replacement.
We tried to contact customer service and there was no way to talk to anyone, so we placed the claim directly with Livro de Reclamações to get the 12 euros from the towels refunded.
I don’t care about the 12 euros, but what makes me indignant is that a company provides such a mediocre service and then washes their hands of it.
Who would send a textile product without any packaging?
How easy it would have been for the company to simply issue a coupon to use on the next purchase. They would have kept a customer and resolved the problem quickly.
To the Livro de Reclamações complaint they responded that they would neither refund the money nor replace the towels.
We then filed a claim with CICAP and since we had already washed the towels, the claim was not justified.
Think also about how absurd it is that I must keep dirty towels for 8 months so that a consumer protection agency can give me the reason for 12 miserable euros.
From this unpleasant experience we learned that we were not going to buy anything more from IKEA.