June 19 2008

Sainsbury’s site goes down

Ouch! Sainsbury’s home delivery site has to pull the plug as it hits problems

First it’s Amazon (http://www.internetretailing.net/news/amazon-goes-down) now it’s Sainsbury’s turn to hit problems. Sainsburys home delivery website is down and Sainsbury’s customers are unable to place or access orders already made. The problem was discovered on Tuesday afternoon, and as this piece was written - Thursday 4pm - the site was still down. [Update 11pm Thursday looks like it's back up]

The site features the message

“We're sorry...We have temporarily frozen our online home delivery website having identified a technical issue. We are contacting customers directly whose deliveries have been affected. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes you.”

According to various sources shoppers are to be offered £10 in compensation, and some 20,000 customers are thought to be affected by the problem.

And this week with perfect comic timing Sainsbury's announce their results which has growth down, although online performed well, with sales growth at over 40%...... we wonder if that might fall in quarter two.

Our thoughts go out to their IT person, we wouldn’t want to be in their shoes at the moment.

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)