Lost, Damaged, and Undelivered Parcels

01

Who bears the risk, in practice

There are three relationships in every failed delivery and they resolve independently, which is the fact that makes this manageable.

• You and the buyer. In consumer selling, the seller is generally responsible for the item until the buyer has it. Marketplace protection programmes are built on that assumption, and consumer law in many jurisdictions puts transit risk on the seller regardless of what your terms say.
• You and the carrier. A separate commercial relationship, governed by their terms, their compensation limits, their evidence requirements, and their claim deadlines.
• You and the platform. Which decides disputes, mostly on tracking evidence, and records the outcome against your account.

The commercial consequence is that carrier compensation is a partial recovery, not your protection. Your protection is choosing services whose evidence and cover match the value at risk, which is a decision made at dispatch — see postage strategy.

02

When a parcel has not arrived

Most "lost" parcels are late. Distinguishing between the two quickly is what keeps this cheap.

1. Read the tracking properly before replying Look for the last scan, its location, and whether the parcel is moving. A parcel scanned into a hub two days ago is delayed; one with no movement for two weeks is lost. Customs holds on international shipments routinely show no movement for extended periods and then complete normally.
2. Reply the same day with specifics Tell the buyer exactly what you can see, what you are doing, and when you will next update them. Vague reassurance produces escalation; a concrete plan and a date almost never does.
3. Give it the carrier's stated window before declaring it lost Carriers will not accept a claim before their own timescale, and a meaningful share of parcels arrive inside it. Tell the buyer that window explicitly so waiting feels like a process rather than a delay.
4. Open the carrier claim as soon as you are eligible Claim windows are finite and start from dispatch or expected delivery. Sellers lose recoverable money by waiting to see whether the buyer complains.
5. Resolve the buyer at the end of the window, whatever the carrier has said Refund or replace. Replacing is often better where you have another unit: the buyer gets what they wanted, the sale stands, and it costs you the item rather than the item plus the revenue.
6. Record the incident against the route and service One loss is noise. A pattern by destination, service, or item type is actionable, and it is invisible unless you write it down.

03

Marked delivered but not received

This is the most uncomfortable case, because the tracking says one thing and a possibly honest buyer says another. Both can be true — parcels are misdelivered to neighbours, left in unexpected places, and taken from doorsteps.

1. Assume good faith first. The overwhelming majority of these are genuine, and treating a real buyer as a suspected fraudster is expensive in feedback and standing.
2. Ask the carrier for delivery detail. GPS coordinates, a photograph, the exact scan location, or the signature. Carriers hold more information than the public tracking page shows, and it frequently resolves the question outright.
3. Ask the buyer to check the obvious places. Neighbours, other household members, safe places, reception or post rooms, and any local depot notice. A large share resolve here.
4. If the delivery data contradicts the tracking, treat it as a misdelivery and pursue the carrier. This is a legitimate claim, and it is what the detailed delivery evidence is for.
5. If it is genuinely ambiguous, resolve it in the buyer's favour and move on. Platform dispute outcomes generally follow the buyer where they claim non-receipt, and fighting one produces a case decided against you — which costs more than the item through seller standing.
6. Change the service, not the policy. If this recurs, use signature or a service with photographic proof of delivery above a value threshold. That is the actual fix.

A small number of buyers do exploit this, and it is genuinely irritating. It is still cheaper to absorb the occasional abuse than to build a fulfilment policy around suspecting everyone, because the policy costs you on every honest order while the abuse costs you on a handful.

04

When it arrives damaged

Damage claims are decided on evidence about the packing, not on the fact of the damage. Carriers routinely decline claims where they judge protection inadequate, which is why the documentation habit in packing fragile and high-value items pays for itself.

1. Ask for photographs immediately, before the packaging is disturbed further The outer box, the packing material, and the item. External damage to the box is what establishes transit as the cause rather than the item having been sent broken.
2. Tell the buyer to keep everything Carriers frequently inspect, and disposal of the packaging ends the claim. Say this in your first message, because packaging goes in the bin within hours otherwise.
3. Resolve the buyer now Refund, replace, or agree a partial refund if the damage is cosmetic and they would rather keep it. Partial refunds are often the best outcome for everyone and they preserve the sale.
4. File the carrier claim with your own evidence Your pre-shipment condition photographs, your packing photographs, the buyer's damage photographs, proof of value, and proof of posting. Claims fail on missing evidence far more often than on merit.
5. Decide whether to recover the item For low-value goods, having it returned costs more than it recovers. For high-value ones, the item may be repairable or worth something for parts, and the carrier may require it for inspection.
6. Change the packing method for that category If an item type breaks twice, the method is wrong. Resolving to be more careful is not a change; a new standard method is.

05

Running a claim that actually succeeds

Treat claims as a small routine rather than an occasional battle. A folder per incident, the evidence gathered as it arrives, and a note of the deadline is enough. Sellers who do this recover a meaningful share of what they lose; sellers who improvise recover very little and conclude that claims never work.

06

Treating failures as a measurable cost

The final step is to stop treating each failure as an anomaly. At any volume, loss and damage form a rate, and a rate can be priced, reduced, and monitored.

1. Log every incident with the item, category, destination, service, cause, cost to you, and whether the claim recovered anything.
2. Compute a failure rate per category and per service. This is the number that belongs in your pricing and in your bid ceiling when buying stock.
3. Look for concentration. Most sellers find failures cluster in one category, one route, or one service rather than spreading evenly. Concentration is good news, because it means one change fixes most of it.
4. Compare the cost of prevention against the cost of failure. Upgrading a service or a box size across a category is worth it precisely when it costs less than the incidents it removes — and you can only know that with the log.
5. Watch the standing impact, not just the money. These incidents generate the case and defect metrics that affect visibility and fees, so their true cost exceeds the refunds.
6. Review quarterly and act on one thing. The single largest contributor, changed properly, beats a general resolution to do better.