Online shopping complaints rise

As the mass hordes of bargain hunters make their annual migration to the high street shops in search of marked down sale items, the more pragmatic and sensible among us will be heading for our computers and laptops instead, to scour the information highway for marked down goods.

The beginning of the sales was marked yesterday on Boxing Day and we all saw scenes of marauding stampedes of militant shoppers - here in London and across the globe - charging through doors and knocking fellow customers and shop assistants alike out of the way and off their feet in the mad dash for cheap sale goods.

But if the prospect of manic shops strewn with muddled sale goods does not exactly fill you with the joys of Spring, then shopping online is the best alternative.

And that is what quite a surprising number of UK shoppers have been doing. But apparently online shopping has not quite proved to be the panacea of the sale period's carnage as is often thought to be the case.

According to government advice service Consumer Direct, complaints about online shopping deliveries have risen by almost a third in the run up to Christmas.

Consumer Direct says that it has registered around 3,000 complaints within the past six weeks about goods that have not been delivered or have been severely delayed - a 29 per cent increase on the same period last year.

Royal Mail has also come under serious criticism for leaving 'you are were out' messages at people's doors instead of even checking if anyone is at home. This gripe is something I am sure many people are familiar with.

The head of media relations for Royal Mail, David Simpson, defied these claims: ''That is something that is not our standard practice at all - if there are isolated incidents here, it is unacceptable.

"We want to hand over the parcel. If someone is not there we leave a card. These claims have no credibility at all - the vast amount [of parcels] have been safely delivered."

But Royal Mail seems to have pulled its act together in the face of criticism and has delivered more than two billion letters and packages in the run up to Christmas.

The Interactive Media in Retail Group, the industry body for the electronic retail community, has predicted that more than £13.8 billion will be spent by the UK's 27 million e-shoppers during the festive season. This figure is up by a significant 42 per cent from last Christmas.

These are promising figures for the online retail industry which are concurrent with the rise in internet use and breadth of people who now own broadband.

But these healthy figures may be tempered by the growing dissatisfaction among UK consumers, with the level of service and fairly poor quality of delivery they are getting.

Sam Tappenden, a spokeswoman for Consumer Direct, believes that the increase in complaints is being blown out of proportion and is unjustified.

"The reason internet claims are on the up is because more people are buying online year on year. We get about 1.7 million calls a year so it puts these figures into perspective," she said.