I was one of the millions of online Christmas shoppers who spent over a billion pounds on the internet at the end of last year, and it seems like I was one of the lucky ones.

All my stuff arrived in time for the big day, my credit card hasn’t been stolen and used by a gang of criminals in Los Angeles, and I got the things I had ordered.

I didn’t think this was especially unusual, until I spotted a report in The Grocer magazine.

I don’t normally read this, as it’s aimed at people working in food shops, but they managed to attract my interest when they checked out our top six online supermarkets just before Christmas.

The Grocer tried to buy the same basket of thirty-three items from each online store, but Asda couldn’t deliver in time for Christmas and it took over two hours to order from Waitrose.

Iceland only had twenty-six of the things they ordered, and Sainsbury’s charged twice for one bottle of wine.

Frightening news

Even Tesco messed up, charging for coffee and washing powder which it didn’t deliver!

This is frightening news, especially since Tesco has been selling online since 1999 so should be able to get it right by now. If we can’t rely on them, then who can we trust?

As if this wasn’t bad enough, one of the few guides to safe shopping on the net is about to close down, leaving us all in the dark when we try to decide who we can rely on.

The Which? Web Trader sign was a familiar sight to anyone shopping online in Britain. 2,700 websites had been checked over by the Consumers’ Association, who run Which?, and given their seal of approval.

The checks weren’t just a rubber stamp, either. Since the scheme was launched in 1999 over 8,000 traders tried to get approved, but only around one third were good enough.

Now the scheme is being scrapped. The Consumers’ Association say it costs too much and, as a charity, they need to spend their money on more useful things.

Reassure shoppers

But it leaves those of us who like to buy from the net without an independent way of checking up on the sites we visit. After all, we don’t want the shops themselves setting up an approval scheme, as who would trust it.

We don’t need anything silly like official licenses for online shops.

We just need a way for online shoppers to get some reassurance when they shop somewhere new, or find a small shop that has just the thing they want.

There is already a government agency - the Office of Fair Trading - that is supposed to look after our rights and make sure that shops are treating customers fairly.

Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense if they took over the scheme from the Consumers’ Association and helped encourage confidence in internet shopping?

There are a lot of picture phones out there, even if few of us can use them successfully.

I’ve seen two friends who run computer companies struggle to send pictures from their new phones, and neither managed it!

If they can’t cope, what chance do the rest of us have?

Perhaps the phone companies should stop pushing picture messages and put more effort into getting things we really do want to work properly – like text messaging.

Failed messages

I was in town last weekend and three important messages failed to get through – one didn’t arrive until over twenty hours after it was sent.

Part of the problem seems to have been that I have an 02 phone and my son was sending messages from T-Mobile – the networks don’t talk to each other as reliably as they could.

But we increasingly use texting to arrange where to meet friends, or send stuff that has to get there quickly. If we can’t rely on it then we’ll just go back to making phone calls instead.

Maybe that’s what the networks want, of course, so they make more money out of us all!

It was a bad Christmas for email users, with a massive increase in the number of unwanted adverts, or ‘spam’ being sent to unwary users.

Some reckon that the number of dodgy emails offering get-rich-quick schemes, weight loss and other dubious services was ten times the normal level!

It certainly seemed that way for me, where one of my email addresses was getting over a hundred junk emails a day.

Stopping spam is hard, because the people sending it generally don’t care about the law and use various tricks to get their emails out.

It can also be very hard to trace where a message came from so they can be stopped by their internet provider.

Hard to stop

Every now and then governments decide to make spam illegal – and then discover that it’s quite hard to write workable laws that stop undesirable messages but still let people use email advertising.

The latest country to try to do this is the United States, where the new Congress will be considering laws against spam later this year.

Since most of the adverts I get are for companies in the US, there’s a chance they could do something about the deluge.

A good start would be to make companies legally responsible for email adverts sent out in their name, just like people who use flyposters to advertise their events can get into trouble even if they didn’t stick them up themselves.