Boots has been preparing its operations, with major updates across its supply chain and boots.com.
Boots biggest ever Black Friday is underway with 21,000 lines on offer, as savvy shoppers take advantage of a whole month of Black Friday deals. Boots has been preparing its operations, with major updates across its supply chain and boots.com.
Both stores and boots.com have been busy throughout November as customers use the Black Friday promotions to kick start their Christmas shopping, with boots.com having its biggest sales day of the year so far. Promotions cover a wide range of popular categories across premium beauty, fragrance, electrical beauty and seasonal gift sets.
Seb James, Managing Director at Boots UK & ROI, said: “Black Friday is the time of year when Boots goes into overdrive to make our gifts even more affordable. This year nearly half of our gifts are £10 or less but we have a huge range to cover all budgets and we have over 21,000 offers across the Black Friday period. This is a huge undertaking and the teams have worked very hard to make sure that our boots.com platform, our shops and our warehouses do a brilliant job of making shopping with us quick and convenient, as well as making it fun for our customers to choose lovely things for their friends and family.”
The main warehouse in Burton-on-Trent, which is at the heart of boots.com and Christmas supply chain, is all ready for a busy trading weekend. It has introduced UK-first technology in the form of a new automated ‘arm’ which is helping to pick an extra 180,000 lines a day, the equivalent to almost 70,000 more orders each day. The warehouse is also supported by a team of 150 ‘Cobots’ – collaborative robots – that pick and pack customer orders all year round but are particularly important at driving efficiency and safety throughout the Black Friday weekend and the busy Christmas trading period.
Boots.com has also been gearing up for its busiest period, making a number of improvements to ensure an easy and simple experience for online customers. The site has introduced quicker ways for customers to add to basket and new secure express payment methods. Boots has also added a shelf barcode scanner option in stores, allowing customers to scan shelves using their phone to order online, a good option if a line is temporarily out of stock. And the Boots Click and Collect service is a great way to shop over Black Friday, with customers able to buy online for delivery to their local store from the very next day, available in over 1,600 stores.
