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By Sonya Rabbitte, 11 January 2001 17:30

NEWS Sanjiv Talwer, MD of ebookers.com, claimed DHL let his company down over Christmas by failing to deliver three urgent orders across Europe. A fourth confirmed order had to be cancelled because the company felt DHL could not deliver on time. Talwer said: "There were several incidents where customers were affected by late delivery on the part of DHL. It was only a few cases but it has led us to review the service levels. We have been in touch with DHL, and we are looking at other courier companies." However, leading courier services have responded by lashing out at the dot-com sector, saying e-tailers still have some hard lessons to learn about order fulfilment and are failing to meet their side of agreements. Parcelforce and Royal Mail delivered a combined total of 2.5 billion items nationwide, and a further 13 million worldwide in the four weeks leading up to Christmas and all its clients were clearly informed of final recommended posting dates. However, a spokesman for the company said some e-tailers are still not getting the message. "It's our responsibility to deliver items that are in our system by that latest date, but it was the e-tailers' responsibility to have their orders in our system by that date. It's no good a customer expecting 48 hour delivery if that order is sitting with the e-tailers for 48 hours before we get it," he said. Rob Wake, head of ecommerce at DHL, said: "We were very specific with e-tailers about Christmas delivery. We gave them a lead time and we have an issue with this e-tailer [ebookers.com] for making promises it can't keep." Wake added: "There are two types of dot-com - those who understand that international delivery is a complex animal and want to work as a strategic partner with DHL and those who say 'we want you to deliver, we don't care how you do it, just go away and do it'." Nigel Moore, marketing manager for home shopping at the Post Office, agrees that dot-com delivery still needs some sharpening up. He said: "We can't be choosy about who we work with because we are the national carrier for Britain, but we do work closely with our customers to integrate their systems and help them to put the protocols they need in place. Delivery has to be a team effort," he said. Moore added: "Unfortunately there are still some websites out there failing on delivery and customer service and they're giving the whole internet channel a bad name."