Primark has said it expects to complete the roll out of its Click & Collect services to all 186 UK stores by the Summer.

The service went live in a further 18 stores on Wednesday, taking the total number offering the service to 131.

Primark announced in April last year that it planned to roll out Click & Collect to all stores by the end of 2025.

“We know that our customers love the convenience that Click & Collect offers, as well as the opportunity to access ranges otherwise only found in larger stores,” said Kari Rodgers, UK retail director, Primark. “With the roll out now due to complete in time for summer we hope this will help make summer holiday shopping that little bit easier.”

Primark currently employs 80,000 people across 450 stores and 17 countries in Europe and the US.

The company recently announced the roll out of new cloud infrastructure as the retailer looks to expand its store network and reduce its physical data centre footprint.

Primark has implemented the new infrastructure to migrate four data centres into two and create a third, with applications able to move between each of them.

The move allows its critical applications, such as those powering its inventory management systems, to be kept on a private cloud with the option to move these applications back and forth from the public cloud when needed.

The cloud rollout forms part of Primark’s wider growth plans, with the company expecting a further 100 store openings by 2026.

Last month, Primark revealed that UK sales had dropped by six per cent across the four months to 4 January.

The budget clothing retailer said that that its sales performance aligned with an overall UK retail market decline, with trading activity weaker within parts of its customer base as a result of "cautious consumer sentiment" and less people buying warmer clothing due to the mild Autumn weather.

Across both the UK and Ireland, which accounted for 45 per cent of total sales, like-for-like sales were also down six per cent.

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