Argos site goes offline due to weekend ‘glitch’

Argos has apologised after customers trying to take up pre-Christmas discounts could not access the retailer’s website due to it being out of action for much of yesterday. Customers across the country took to social media account to complain about being unable to access the Argos site.

Argos said in a statement on Sunday: “We are extremely sorry for the temporary service issues our customers were experiencing on our website this afternoon.

“We have identified and fixed the issue and our site is now up and running.

“We apologise to any customer who has tried to contact us unsuccessfully today and we are working to respond to all enquiries as soon as we can.”

Last year, Argos’s website suffered problems for two days following a revamped design of the site.

It displayed an error message on some computers, but not others, saying access had been blocked because of a “high volume of visitors”.

This outage not only had significantly negative implications for sales, but also for brand reputation with some customers declaring that “this would be the last time’ they shopped with the catalogue store business.

Paul Heywood, EMEA managing director at Internet performance company Dyn, commeted on the outage: “Downtime can cause huge problems for retailers. Not only does downtime halt sales, but the long term damage on a brand’s reputation can be immeasurable. Online retailers face high expectations from shoppers who expect the site to be secure, fast and reliable at all times and downtime means they turn to a competitor. To combat this, when an outage of magnitude occurs, retailers need to make sure that they have the right technology in place to still deliver an optimal customer experience.

“With a well-executed technology strategy in place, retailers are able to monitor, control and optimise their online infrastructure at scale – for high volume sale periods, but also as a best practice for normal trading. Focusing on Internet Performance means that retailers can deliver great customer experience consistently, which is imperative to build brand loyalty.”