Tesco customers were left waiting at home for online shopping orders that were not delivered following IT problems over the weekend.
Customers have complained that they were forced to wait in for grocery deliveries for hours, with no information or updates from Tesco, only to have their orders cancelled.
Tesco staff said they were receiving a large number of calls from people who had placed online orders that hadn’t been delivered in the allocated timeslot.
Customers affected were told staff were unable to contact delivery drivers or stores to find out when or if orders would be fulfilled.
The problems, which impacted the company’s booking systems, affected a “small” proportion of Tesco orders in a “small proportion of our stores”, according to Tesco.
With the company reporting 1.1 million online deliveries a week, the problems may have affected a significant number of people, including those who are unable to visit a store because of illness or care commitments.
“It is affecting a lot of customers, but given the number of orders we receive, this is a small [proportion] of customers,” Tesco told one customer when they enquired about their delivery.
Customers were told initially that IT problems meant the system had allowed delivery slots to be booked when they were no longer available. That led to overbooking and cancelled orders.
Tesco’s booking system, which normally allocates shopping orders to delivery vans automatically, was not working correctly, meaning that some orders were selected but not allocated to “routed” delivery vans, requiring store staff to manually intervene.
“This has been really painful because everyone is expecting their order. We are not able to contact the store to find out what is going on,” one customer was told.
Computer Weekly understands that as Tesco fixed the problems affecting its stores, customers continued to have issues with deliveries from Tesco’s urban fulfilment centres (UFCs).
One customer told Computer Weekly that she had ordered a delivery for between 8.00am and 9.00am. When the order failed to arrive by 6pm, Tesco offered to rebook for another day, but could not guarantee that the same problems wouldn’t happen again. She cancelled the order after it had failed to turn up by 10pm.
“Someone had to stay in all day in case the delivery came, so we were effectively held hostage to Tesco,” she said. “We did not get our delivery. The company apologised and gave us a goodwill voucher.”
Tesco customers turned to X to complain about missing or delayed deliveries on Monday 21 July, and continued to report problems over the weekend.
One person wrote: “Thanks @tesco for cancelling my order overnight. I’m caring for my elderly, poorly dad and was rather counting on the delivery as I can’t leave him. I want to know what the ‘technical issuers’ were that led to you letting us down so badly?”
A Tesco spokesperson said: “Due to a technical issue with our booking system, we had to cancel a small number of grocery home shopping orders from a small proportion of our stores last week. We contacted affected customers directly and are really sorry for the inconvenience.”