Ocado expected to impose rationing on more products

Ocado is expected to increase rationing on its site when it reopens on Saturday as it tries to cope with overwhelming demand for grocery home deliveries.

The online grocer is already limiting sales of around 500 products but signalled that was likely to increase as it sought to “ensure a fairer distribution of our capacity” to shoppers.

Ocado stopped taking orders on Wednesday and will not start taking new orders until the weekend. All its delivery slots had already been fully booked.

“The decision to close was not because we could not cope,” said the group’s finance director, Duncan Tatton-Brown. “The website closed so we could make changes to the code that supports it to enable us to share our capacity in a more fair and accessible way. You can imagine some people are ordering a much larger basket and it’s only right for us to consider a fairer allocation. We need to find a way to make it fairer.”

Tatton-Brown declined to give further details – other supermarkets have already removed multi-buys amid panic buying that has stripped shelves – because it wanted to “communicate with customers in a coherent way”.

The changes being made will also seek to support vulnerable Britons who have been forced to self-isolate. “We will try and do the right thing for those who are vulnerable, be that because of age or because of some health condition,” he added. “One of the reasons for closing the site is to do more of that.”

The retailer has been inundated with orders in recent weeks, leading to the introduction of a queuing system on the site. “We were experiencing four times the demand of our highest-ever peak,” said Tatton-Brown.

“Our systems thought they were experiencing a denial of service attack. We have had hours in the week when we have had 100 times the normal level of transactions on the website. This is really unprecedented levels of demand.”

Ocado said that despite the images of empty supermarket shelves on social media there were no serious grocery shortages at present. “We are able to deliver 98% of goods that customers have ordered. Customers can get what they want and suppliers can give us what the customer wants.”

The online grocer said that at one stage demand from customers had been so high that its servers thought it was experiencing a cyberattack.