Woolworth's back online after scare

High street retail giant Woolworth's will finally relaunch its website this week, two months after it was closed down due to security problems. But uncertainty remains over whether the site will be able to deal with predicted volumes.

The www.woolies.co.uk site was closed on 11 August after a customer discovered credit card details, names, addresses and phone numbers of other Woolworth's customers. The store was forced to pay an undisclosed sum in compensation to the affected users.

The site went live in time for Christmas last year, but the company maintains that it was only a trial, and that a full launch this autumn had always been planned.

After the security breach, and a full investigation into the problem, Woolworth's initially expected the site to be down temporarily until 18 August. The store claims it then decided to leave the site down until the relaunch to allow for full testing.

"As the launch date of the site came closer and closer, we decided to keep it down permanently until the main site was put back up this week," said spokesman Mike McGann.

"We have been testing it over the past six weeks. There will be a lot more information, as well as many more products and services that customers can buy. You will be able to buy whatever is in the store, plus all the other heavy goods items we can't have in it," he added.

McGann also said that the retailer cannot yet gauge the potential volume of users. "We have a million customers going through our stores every day, so they are all potential website users, as are all the other people who don't go to the store. It's getting very difficult to know how many hits we are going to get," he said.

The security breach was one of a spate of such incidents during the summer. Also affected were the online facilities of Barclays and utility company PowerGen.

Halifax online subsidiary Intelligent Finance, which relaunched two weeks ago, had delayed its web banking operation because of fears that the system could not cope with the volume of customers expected.

First published in Computing