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Up to six million families face a Christmas Day of apologies and excuses as gifts ordered online fail to arrive on time or disappear altogether.

Research suggests that if the failure rate remains the same as last year, 5.6 million parcels will either be returned to sender or disposed of by the carrier. Another 700,000 presents will trickle in after December 25.

Even conservative estimates suggest that Britons taking part in the online shopping boom, which reached a new high this week when £370 million was spent online in a single day, will find that 1.5 million gifts will go astray.

Paul Galpin, of dsicmm, the direct communications company behind the research, said that delivery companies had not learnt the lessons of last year. “Nothing materially has changed in the way that distribution companies are handling the parcels,” he said. “Most parcel carriers are running at or above their technical capacity.”

He added that carriers delivering to the wrong address was a critical problem, either because the details were entered incorrectly or were out of date. The Interactive Media in Retail Group, an industry body for online shops, disputed the claims and predicted that the failure rate would fall to 0.5 per cent — the equivalent of 1.5 million parcels. James Roper, its chief executive, said that failure rates have fallen steadily since May last year. “Carriers have really got their act together,” he said. “First-time delivery failure has fallen from 12 per cent to 8 per cent and total failure is significantly less than that.”

He said that the main culprits for unfulfilled orders were retailers that take orders on items not in stock.

Royal Mail, which expects the surge in online sales to contribute 120 million parcels to its Christmas workload of two billion items, said that its failure rate was a “tiny fraction of a per cent”. James Eadie, a spokesman, said that correctly addressed items would all be delivered provided someone was there to receive them. “Last year everything in our system by the last received posting date was delivered on time. Millions of items posted after that date will also be delivered before Christmas.”

Last posting dates this year are December 17 for 2-class items, December 20 for 1st-class and December 22 for special delivery.

Mr Eadie said that failure rates would be lower this year because retailers had dropped the requirement to deliver only to the customer’s credit card address.

Amazon, the online retailer, has promised that customers in London and Birmingham will be able to order items on Christmas Eve morning and receive them the same day. Its failure rate last year was less than 1 per cent.

— Romantic letter-writers are devastated as the post office in the village of Lover — pronounced “Louver” — is set to close. Each year before Valentine’s Day the post office receives thousands of letters just so they can be stamped with “Lover”. Some people have been posting letters there for decades. Wiltshire County Council has vowed to fight the plans.

Stand and deliver

— Royal Mail will deliver bees, worms, caterpillars, leeches, fish eggs and maggots if packaged correctly. However, crackers are forbidden as they contain explosives

— It receives 750,000 letters each year to Father Christmas. Those sent by December 11 receive a reply

— Royal Mail runs a bus service in Llanidloes, Mid Wales, which carries passengers alongside its mailbags

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