Marks & Spencer has had to delay deliveries of online orders by up to two weeks and withdraw next-day delivery services to stores after being beset by problems at the busiest shopping time of the year.
Disappointed customers have been complaining on social media about delays to their orders which have been caused by problems at the retailer’s distribution centre in Castle Donington, Leicestershire, which opened in May last year.
While some orders have been delayed by up to two weeks, next-day deliveries to customers’ homes have been taking up to two or three days and M&S has withdrawn its next-day deliveries to stores.
The company admitted it had been forced to extend delivery times after its Black Friday weekend promotions as its distribution centre could not keep up with demand.
Other retailers have also struggled. Last week Tesco customers were complaining of long delays for click-and-collect orders placed around the time of Black Friday, a relatively new promotional event imported from the US.
M&S’s Facebook page has a number of complaints from customers. One wrote that an item ordered a fortnight earlier had been delayed for another week. “Every other shop can deliver quickly – has Christmas crept up on M&S before they noticed. Huh – rubbish service,” the shopper wrote. Another shopper was annoyed after their order was delayed by a week: “Not good enough M&S as some of the items required for this week. Please get your act together or I will be thinking twice about ordering from you.”
Monday is predicted to be the biggest shopping of the day of the year so far by data firm Experian and online retailing trade association IMRG. Consumers are predicted to spend £676m and retailers braced for 151m visits to websites.
Experian predicted that online shopping would break records this year.
“With increased confidence in the standard of delivery services and click and collect, we expect to see people break away from traditional shopping habits,” said James Miller from Experian.
While other retailers are experiencing strong increases in online sales as shopping from the sofa becomes more popular, M&S’s website has been losing customers since the retailer took control of its running from Amazon in February.
When M&S first opened its state-of-the-art distribution centre, the company said it would be able to handle 1m items a day by the end of this year. But sources said that the 900,000sq ft distribution centre’s high tech automation was beset with problems. The company has previously denied that there were problems at its distribution centre, but online sales slumped 6% at marksandspencer.com in the six months to the end of September. Close to 5 million customers had registered on the site by the start of November, 1 million fewer than on the previous one.
Shoppers have found navigating M&S’s new magazine-style site tricky while some have been put off by having to re-register their details in the wake of the handover from Amazon. Sources said the problems at the distribution centre meant that online sales at M&S were set to fall again in this quarter, despite hopes of achieving the same level as last year.
M&S said it had reinstated next-day delivery to homes but that deliveries to stores would take at least two days while standard deliveries, which normally take three to five days, could take up to 10 days. It said some products, such as wine and flowers which are not handled at Castle Donington, had not been affected.
An M&S spokesperson said: “Our customer is always our top priority and that is why we’ve extended some of our delivery options. The vast majority of orders are delivered on time. If we do miss a delivery date, we will do all we can to rectify it for the customer.”
M&S’s new delivery centre is part of a £1bn programme to improve ageing IT and distribution systems in order to ensure it has the right items in stores and is able to handle increasing demand for home deliveries. M&S initially hoped to cut costs by using three distribution centres, down from more than 50 warehouses last year. But it pulled out of building one of the new facilities earlier this year.
