Integrated to Win: IKEA China’s Omnichannel Launch on Tmall

This project marks a groundbreaking chapter for IKEA’s global digital strategy. For the first time in its history, IKEA entered a third-party eCommerce platform—Alibaba’s Tmall—in China, a bold departure from its traditional offline and direct-to-consumer retail model. Spearheaded by Tiantian Shao, a dynamic marketing leader, this project blended global brand heritage with China’s rapidly evolving digital ecosystem to deliver outstanding business results.

Tiantian Shao led the initiative from the ground up, orchestrating a comprehensive campaign that involved platform negotiations, full technical integration, cross-platform membership unification, content development, and operational restructuring. Her leadership connected disparate departments including IT, logistics, creative, and marketing into a unified execution engine.

The campaign was designed to do more than launch a store—it aimed to create a seamless digital customer journey. The strategy combined Tmall’s massive public traffic ecosystem with IKEA’s private app traffic, ensuring both visibility and sustainable customer retention. Through innovative tactics like livestream shopping, influencer-driven promotions, and interactive “cloud signing” events, the campaign ignited widespread consumer interest.

The impact was both immediate and substantial. Within just two weeks, the IKEA Tmall flagship store gained over 2 million followers, setting an all-time record in the home furnishing category. Daily active users (DAU), gross merchandise volume (GMV), and conversion rates exceeded benchmarks by over 30%, rivaling or surpassing competitors who had operated on Tmall for years.

Beyond commercial success, the project introduced structural innovations like cross-platform membership integration, allowing customers to enjoy synchronized benefits across both Tmall and IKEA’s owned platforms—an unprecedented achievement in IKEA’s global operations.

IKEA’s global leadership officially recognized the campaign as a global best practice, now serving as a blueprint for other markets. More importantly, this project has become an industry case study in how traditional retailers can successfully adapt to marketplace-driven models without compromising brand control or customer relationships.

This is more than a campaign—it’s a retail transformation.