The perils of running a successful e-commerce business were highlighted again yesterday, after the BBC reported that popular online retailer Play.com had been hit by problems affecting its online ordering system.

It appears that many customers received emails for orders they had not placed. On opening those emails they found the names, addresses and other contact details of other Play.com customers.

Simon Hurley from Clevedon near Bristol said he had received more than 80 Play.com emails, and when he called the customer services line, was told that the firm had a “massive problem”, according to the Beeb.

"I'm a big customer of theirs but not that big," he is reported as saying. " I opened up each individual email and it came up with another customer's name and their order.

"People are being told to shred documents and then you have a big company like Play.com sending out hundreds of wrong emails to their customers.”

Luckily for Play.com, it appears there were no credit card details on any of the emails, however the cause of the problem remains a mystery.

A Play.com statement said that the cause of the incident had now been “identified and resolved”, according to the report.

"We were alerted to an incident that appears to have affected some customers for a short period of time in the early hours of this morning, and the first thing we'd like to say is that we apologise for any inconvenience our customers have experienced as a result,” read the statement.

"We take these matters very seriously and are now investigating how this incident occurred in the first place, so that we can prevent it happening in the future."

However, Play.com appears to have been slow to acknowledge the incident publically or reassure its customers. No messages appeared on either its Facebook or Twitter pages at the time of writing.