J Sainsbury : Argos shoppers set for 14-day shopping bonanza!

The leading digital retailer will once again offer deals galore on thousands of products from top brands including Dyson, Phillips, Samsung, Xbox, PS4 and Lenovo across the whole period.

Whilst the deals remain a closely-guarded secret, there will be sizable discounts available on over 60,000 products across a range of toys, homewares and electricals.

Falling on 24 November, Black Friday - the most popular day in the shopping calendar - marks the start of the festive shopping season for customers, with many also taking advantage of the opportunity for self-gifting, adopting a 'one for you, one for me' state of mind.

Cyber Monday (27 November) also continues to be an important day for online shopping and falls around pay day for many people this year.

Argos expects Black Friday to be dominated by digital platforms again this year, after its website received more than 12 million visits in less than 24 hours during 2016. Customers made a staggering 18 transactions a second at peak times during the day and 75 per cent of all visits were from mobile and tablet devices.

Free Fast Track store collection more than doubled year-on-year in 2016. Across the four days of the Black Friday weekend, Argos delivered 263,000 products to 146,000 customers through Fast Track delivery.

John Rogers, Argos CEO, said: 'Last year's Black Friday was the biggest and most successful shopping day ever for Argos, with the first hours seeing the largest amount of online traffic in our history.

'We have been busy preparing for the Black Friday period for many months now, ensuring our digital channels, stores and distribution centres are all geared up in anticipation for high levels of demand for what we expect to be fantastic deals across must-have products.

'Black Friday and Cyber Monday have definitely changed how people shop for Christmas, with many using it for the initial burst of gift buying in the festive season, whether they choose to shop in store, online, or by mobile.'

Last year savvy shoppers were ready to snap up bargains as soon as deals went live at midnight - with half a million visits to Argos's digital channels between midnight and 1am, equating to 8,000 visits per minute.

Tech and gaming fans were early birds, with 57 per cent of all deals purchased between 12am - 4.30am being video games consoles, games and tablets.

The biggest hour was 9-10am with 720,000 visits to the Argos website, equating to 12,000 visits a minute and 18 orders per second.

Argos has more than 800 stores across the UK and Republic of Ireland, which includes approximately 150 Argos stores within Sainsbury's supermarkets, with 165 planned by Christmas 2017, and around 200 digital collection points in Sainsbury's stores.'

Argos has recruited an additional 10,000 seasonal workers to help serve millions of customers in its stores over 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's 11 distribution centres covering more than five million square feet of floor space will have around 5,000 warehouse workers, supported by 3,000 Fast Track drivers, using 950 delivery vans based at local stores.

Argos's Fast Track delivery service offers customers same-day home delivery in as little as four hours for just £3.95 and covers more than 90 per cent of the country.

On Black Friday, 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.