Shoppers racing to the Boots app and website to take advantage of the retailer’s “biggest-ever” Black Friday Sale ran into technical difficulties as they tried to shop yesterday.
The health and beauty retailer was forced to place shoppers in a temporary virtual queue as its app and website repeatedly crashed during its Sale for Black Friday.
As first reported by The Telegraph, customers complained of being “locked out” of Boots’ website while others said the app was failing to load.
The retailer showed customers a message admitting its website was “rather busy with Black Friday shoppers” and telling them they had been “temporarily placed in a virtual queue”.
On X, Boots replied to shoppers: ”We are currently experiencing some issues with the system and we are looking into it. In the meantime, please keep refreshing or call us so an adviser can place the order for you.”
The crash coincided with the retailer’s “£10 Tuesday” deal and shoppers reported issues with the site for several hours from Tuesday morning onwards.
One customer reported at 1.50pm that they had been trying to use the company’s website for “hours now and still no joy”.
A spokesman for Boots told The Telegraph it had experienced “extremely high demand” and said: “To manage demand, a temporary queuing system was put in place for a short period of time. The site quickly returned to normal.”
Boots will roll out 22,000 promotions in November with the most offers on Black Friday weekend, spanning from November 29 to December 2.
The health and beauty retailer plans to run offers on a range of products including premium beauty, baby, fragrance and electrical beauty, many of which will be more than half-price.
Speaking to Retail Week, Jenna Whittingham-Ward, head of gift transformation and strategic brand partnerships said: “Black Friday has become a really big part of the golden quarter now, so people see it as part of that Christmas journey to buy some gifts there.
“And I think the way it falls this year is really critical. It falls on payday for a lot of people. So for us, it’s our biggest-ever Black Friday. But we’re expecting it to be huge across the market because of the phasing of it with people being paid.
“We have started some of our deals already, especially on the beauty elements that we’re really excited about. Premium beauty had some offers on promo this weekend. So we’ve started the momentum up to that Black Friday peak.”
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