This was a not uncommon problem for the ecommerce players. A startup named Furniture.com raised $75 million only to learn a lesson that Ikea had known about for years: you can’t exactly send a couch via UPS. “There were many cases when we would get an order for a $200 end table and then spend $300 to ship it,” a former Furniture.com engineer would admit. “We never could figure it out.”
