Argos launches thirteen-day shopping event

Argos’ eagerly anticipated Black Friday bonanza will kick-off on Friday 18 November and will run for 13 consecutive days through Cyber Monday.

The leading retailer will once again offer deals galore on thousands of products across the whole period as UK shoppers look to help themselves to a wealth of bargains in the run-up to Christmas.

Falling on November 25, Black Friday, the most popular day in the shopping calendar, marks the serious start of the festive shopping season as customers take advantage of the bargains available for a little self-gifting and adopt a ‘one for you, one for me’ state of mind.

Cyber Monday (November 28) also continues to be an important day for online shopping and falls on pay day for many people this year.

Argos expects Black Friday to be a digital day again this year, after its website received around 12 million visits on the day itself in 2015 with customers making a staggering 18 transactions a second during peak trading periods.

Over 70 per cent of all visits were from mobile and tablet devices and a quarter of total online sales were fulfilled via the newly introduced Fast Track Same-Day Delivery and Fast Track In-Store Collection services, allowing shoppers to get hold of their deals at a time to suit them.

Whilst the deals remain a closely guarded secret, Argos insists that there will be some sizable discounts available on a range of technology, toys, consumer electronics and domestic appliances.

John Rogers, Chief Executive Officer of Sainsbury’s Argos, said: “Last year’s Black Friday was the biggest and most successful shopping day ever for Argos.

“We have been busy preparing for the Black Friday period for many months now, making sure our website, stores and distribution operations are all geared up in anticipation of high levels of demand for our great range of products.

“Without doubt Black Friday and Cyber Monday have changed how people shop for Christmas in the past few years but we remain focused on making shopping easy and convenient for customers, so they can get a great deal, whether they choose to shop with us in store or online, or a combination of the two.”

Argos has over 800 stores across the UK and Ireland as well as almost 30 stores in Sainsbury’s supermarkets and another 30 digital collection points in Sainsbury’s stores.

Argos has recruited an additional 10,000 seasonal workers to help serve millions of customers across the festive period. On Black Friday itself, they will be joined by hundreds of head office workers helping out on the shop floor.

To get the deals and top products out to stores and customers’ homes, Argos’ 11 enormous distribution centres covering a total of 5.4 million square feet of floor space will have 6,100 warehouse workers and 1,000 delivery drivers, supported by 3,000 Fast Track drivers based at local stores.

High-demand products being ferried across the UK this Christmas using a fleet of 1,800 lorries and Fast Track vans include wearable tech such as Fitbit, Virtual Reality Headsets, 4K & LED TVs, X-boxes with games such as FIFA 17, and Amazon Fire Sticks, as well as a thousands of the most popular toys including Star Wars, Hatchimals, Lego and Tiny Treasures.

Same-day Fast Track delivery slots will be offered to customers on a first-come, first-served basis with subsequent days’ slots offered once Black Friday’s delivery schedules are full.

This year Argos expects to see a repeat of last year’s shopping patterns as customers stayed up to shop into the small hours to snap up the best deals as soon as they launched. Ten orders per second were processed between 1am and 2am (340,000 digital visits). Early bird shoppers were gaming and tech fans.

By 9 am, digital channels had already seen 3.2 million visits and breakfast shoppers were after computing bargains, especially laptops. Peak hour was 8am to 9am with nearly one million visits.

Across the full week including Black Friday, customers visited Argos digital channels over 42 million times.

Source : Argos Press Release

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