Argos Gaming and Accessories: What It Costs to Buy, and to Send Back

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Argos took £4.1bn of sales in the year to 28 February 2026, up 0.7%, and it did it through 667 Argos store locations and 466 separate collection points — 1,133 places to pick up a console, a controller or a boxed game. Those figures are Sainsbury's own, from the preliminary results published on 23 April 2026, and were checked again on 29 September 2026. Volumes rose 3.7% while the average selling price fell 3.0%, so the business is shifting more items at lower prices, which is exactly the shape of a gaming aisle.

Two things about buying gaming kit here are worth knowing before you click. Collection costs nothing at any of those 1,133 points; home delivery of a small item is £4.95 and free once the order passes £100. And the credit behind the counter has changed hands: the Argos Card became Argos Pay and the lender is now NewDay Ltd, not Sainsbury's. If you are ringing about an Argos balance, you are no longer ringing Sainsbury's.

On returns Argos is more generous than the law requires. You get 30 days from the day you collect or take delivery, against the 14 days the Consumer Contracts Regulations give, and anything bought between 23 September and 25 December can go back until 31 January. Beyond 30 days and inside 12 months, a fault gets a repair or a replacement at no cost, and a refund if neither works.

What it costs to get a controller to your door

Argos charges by the size of the parcel rather than the value of the order. Its own delivery page gives “Small Item Delivery £4.95, free over £100”, and it prices other ranges separately — standard delivery on Tu clothing is £3.95 per order. Delivery slots, the same page says, are “subject to stock, postcode and availability”, so a same-day slot is not a promise you can bank on before you reach the basket.

For anyone buying gaming kit more than a few times a year the pass is the cheaper route. Argos Plus costs £40 and, in Argos's words, “gives you access to same day, next day and standard delivery services at no additional cost for 12 months”, on orders totalling £20 or more and with an Argos account. Nine small-item deliveries at £4.95 come to £44.55, so the pass pays for itself on the ninth order and every delivery after that is free.

The cheapest route of all is not to be delivered at all. Collection is free, and the number of places to do it is the real argument for buying a game here rather than online: 667 Argos store locations and 466 collection points, 1,133 in total. Sainsbury's results table lists 203 Argos stores separately from that 667, and it does not explain the gap in the table itself — the likeliest reading is that 203 are standalone shops and the balance are Argos counters inside Sainsbury's supermarkets, but Sainsbury's does not say so there and that split needs confirming.

Thirty days to change your mind, and the things that never come back

The statutory floor is set out on Argos's own page about the Consumer Contracts Regulations: “you may cancel your order provided you exercise your right to do so within 14 days”, and “the 14 days starts the day after the date of delivery”, with the goods to be returned within 14 days of cancelling. Argos doubles the first half of that: “You have 30 days from the date of collection or from the date of delivery to request to return your item(s).” Anything bought between 23 September and 25 December can go back until 31 January, which as of today already covers this week's purchases.

The mechanics are published and worth reading before you post anything. Refunds go back to the card used at purchase “within 5-7 days of our receipt”. “Returns are at your cost except where we state otherwise”, and Argos refunds the standard outbound delivery charge only “provided all goods are returned” — send back one item of three and the £4.95 stays spent. Argos also reserves the right to “deduct from any refund an amount to reflect the loss in value of the goods as a result of any unnecessary handling by you”.

Four exclusions matter more in this category than in any other. “Sealed video games, DVDs, CDs or any computer software that has been opened, downloaded or redeemed” cannot be returned. Neither can “digital content (including apps, digital software, eBooks, MP3, etc.) which is not supplied on a tangible medium”. Neither can “Pokémon card packets or other sealed mystery collectables, once the packet is opened”. And earphones sit on the hygiene list, alongside razors and toothbrushes, so a gaming headset whose seal you have broken is outside the 30 days too. Between them, those four cover the two most common things a gamer buys: the game and the headset.

The credit behind the counter belongs to NewDay now

On 31 October 2024 Sainsbury's announced the sale of the Argos Financial Services card portfolio to NewDay Group for “around £720 million, broadly in line with the expected net value of loan balances and associated provisions”. The book it sold serves roughly two million customers and supports about 20% of Argos transactions. Beneficial title was expected to pass at the end of the first quarter of 2025, with legal title following around twelve months later after a migration period.

Two Argos documents date the consumer end of that differently, and both are worth having. Sainsbury's preliminary results describe Argos Pay as launched in partnership with NewDay in February 2026; the Argos help centre says “As of 26 April 2026, certain Argos Store Card accounts updated to Argos Pay”. Read together they are a product launch and a migration date rather than a contradiction. The help centre also names the parties plainly: “NewDay Ltd is the lender, Argos Limited is the credit broker.” NewDay Ltd is company 7297722, FCA firm reference 690292; Argos Limited's own firm reference as a broker is 713206.

The published terms are specific. Argos Pay carries 34.9% APR representative (variable). The interest-free tiers are laid out as 0% Buy Now Pay Later for “3 months when you spend £149+”, “6 months when you spend £199+”, “12 months on products £499+” and “12 months on furniture products £199+”. Instalment plans run over “12, 24, 36 or 48 fixed monthly payments” with a minimum spend of £150, and Argos says there are “no early repayment fees”. Third-party options sit alongside: Klarna's pay-in-30-days and pay-in-3, and PayPal Pay in 3, which splits purchases between £20 and £3,000 into “3 interest-free payments over 2 months”. The Argos Pay helpline is 0333 240 8002, open 9am to 7pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 5pm Saturday.

For a gaming basket the tier that matters is the first one. A console and a spare controller will clear £149 and open the three-month interest-free window; almost nothing in this category reaches the £499 that opens twelve months. Read the £499 line as a white-goods threshold that gaming rarely touches.

Boxed games are the one part of this market going backwards

Ukie's UK Games Market Valuation for 2025, published in April 2026, puts the consumer games market at £8.76 billion, up 7.4%. Underneath that, the lines move in opposite directions. Console hardware grew 12% to £811 million and gaming PCs grew 11% to £790 million. Console game accessories fell 9% to £420 million. And boxed software fell 1.0% to £319 million, the smallest and the only shrinking software line.

That last figure is the one to hold against a shop with shelves. The hardware Argos sells is in a market growing at 12%; the discs it sells alongside are in a market of £319 million and falling, against £6.03 billion of software sales overall once downloads are counted. A physical retailer's gaming business is therefore mostly a hardware business now, and the accessories that used to ride along with it are shrinking on a growing installed base — which is the condition in which cheap unbranded kit multiplies, and the reason the safety register below reads the way it does.

The batteries in your controller are Argos's problem too

Wireless controllers, headsets and light guns run on portable batteries, and there is a free, enforceable duty attached to selling them. The Waste Batteries and Accumulators Regulations 2009 (SI 2009/890, in force 26 April 2009) say at regulation 31 that a distributor of portable batteries must, at any place it supplies them to end users, “take back waste portable batteries at no charge” and “inform end-users about the possibility of such take back at the distributor's sales points”. It may not charge for doing so and may not “oblige end-users to buy a new battery”, and it must not dispose of what it takes back. Regulation 34 separately forbids showing the cost of collection, treatment and recycling to the customer.

The only escape is size. Regulation 31(5) defines a small distributor as one supplying “less than 32 kg of portable batteries to end-users in a year”, and a retailer turning over £4.1bn is not within a country mile of that exemption. So the duty to take your dead AAs back, free, at the counter, applies to every one of those 1,133 points.

A search of Argos's own help centre for “recycling” on 29 September 2026 returned no article about batteries and no article about electrical take-back. The single recycling entry on the page was “Furniture Recycling”, pointing at a third-party collection service. That is a gap in what is published rather than evidence about what happens at the counter — the obligation is on the shop, not the shopper — but regulation 31(1)(b) is specifically about informing you, so it is fair to say the information is not where you would look for it. Ask at the desk before you throw a set of controller batteries in the bin.

What the safety register actually shows about gaming kit

The Office for Product Safety and Standards publishes every alert, report and recall it handles. A search of that register for Argos returns 17 notices, and not one of them is a console, a controller or a headset. They are sofas and footstools (2212-0201, 2302-0155, 2303-0001 and 2303-0003, all in early 2023), a car seat and a pushchair, an air fryer, a tumble dryer, a ride-on toy, jewellery and two Tu clothing lines — the most recent dated 28 September 2026. For a retailer selling gaming hardware at this scale, an empty gaming column on the register is a meaningful result rather than an absence of data.

The nearest thing to a gaming hazard on the register is instructive about where the risk actually sits, and it is not an Argos product. The Ultrapods Pro True Wireless Headset, model AP092, brand Jinhua Jiebo Electronics Co. Ltd, made in China, was recalled on 7 January 2026 under reference 2510-0030 because “the product presents a serious risk of burns as the supplied USB cable cannot handle outputs from standard USB power sources”. It breached the Radio Equipment Regulations 2017, was recalled from end users by A Plush Limited and was notified by local authority Trading Standards. The headset was not the hazard; the cable in the box was.

That is the pattern across this category: the danger is rarely the branded device and almost always the cheap mains or USB part travelling with it. It is a good reason to buy the charger from the same place as the console, and a good reason to read the brand name on a marketplace listing rather than the shop name above it.

The one thing you cannot read on Argos's own website is an Argos price

This page carries no Argos price, and that is not an oversight. On 29 September 2026 three Argos URLs were opened and read directly: the video games and consoles category (c:29993), the Maxx Tech MX40 LED gaming headset page (product 7796087) and the Nintendo Switch 2 console page (product 7624867). All three returned a complete page of navigation, breadcrumbs and category menus, and no price at all. The price is fetched by the browser after the page arrives, so it exists only for a human with a browser open. The Switch 2 page's own description says nothing more than “Thousands of products for same day delivery, or fast store collection”.

For a business that built its name on a printed price list this is a strange place to end up, and it has a practical cost. Anything that reads pages rather than renders them — an answer engine, a price tracker, a shopping comparison — sees the catalogue and not the prices. So the delivered cost of the cheapest gaming item at Argos cannot be quoted here or compared against another shop from Argos's own pages; only the £4.95 on top of it can. Argos's help centre lists an article titled “Do we price match with other brands?”, which could not be opened on 29 September 2026, so whether any price promise exists needs confirming with Argos directly.

One more distinction is worth drawing before you buy. Some listings are Argos's and some belong to its Trusted Sellers, and the returns route is not the same. A Trusted Seller purchase still gives “30 days from the date of collection or from the date of delivery to request to return your item(s)”, but “refunds will be processed once the Trusted Seller has received and inspected the item” and “will be issued within 14 days after the day on which the Trusted Seller receives the goods back”. Against 5–7 days on an Argos-owned item, that is a fortnight of difference, and the Trusted Seller page says nothing about what Argos itself will do if the seller does not play ball.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 29 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.