Parents' group calls for online books retailer to contact waiting customers

THE NATIONAL Parents Council for post-primary schools has urged online retailer schoolbooks.ie to contact customers still waiting for the delivery of books.

Thousands of children returned to school this week without the required texts because of an order backlog at the company which it said was caused by a technical glitch at its warehouse.

The council said it was “appalling” that parents and children should find themselves without school books at “this late stage”.

Spokeswoman Jackie O’Callaghan appealed to the company to contact frustrated parents, many of whom, she said, had been left in the dark about their orders despite repeated attempts to contact the retailer. In an email to the company, Ms O’Callaghan said: “This is nothing more than common courtesy and best practice. The longer you refrain from communicating with people the more negativity and bad press you create.”

The company said yesterday it was tracking all orders and monitoring the status of deliveries on an ongoing basis to ensure that all customers received their orders as soon as possible.

Managing director John Cunningham said the company was manually reviewing the order backlog to ensure it had accounted for all orders that were part of this original issue. “At this point, we believe that there are orders yet to be delivered, but until this manual cross-check has been completed, we cannot accurately confirm the exact number outstanding.”

Mr Cunningham again apologised to customers who had experienced delays, saying it was never the company’s intention to mislead customers.

“The updates which we have provided have been in good faith based on the information systems which we use in our warehouse. However, we accept that we have made errors in those updates.”

The company claimed on Tuesday that the backlog had been cleared and that all outstanding orders would be delivered by Tuesday evening at the latest.

However, several frustrated customers contacted this newspaper on Tuesday evening and yesterday to say they were still waiting for their books and were having difficulties contacting the company.

One reader wrote: “I am totally dismayed and utterly exhausted from corresponding with them by email, fax, phone and they are doing nothing about it. I ordered my books on August 15th but I still don’t have them.”

Another customer, who could not find any trace of his order tracking number on the company’s website, managed to cancel his order with a full refund before purchasing the required books from a different retailer.

The parents’ council said customers were within their rights to cancel orders within 30 days of purchase.