When a parcel goes missing: enquiries, claims and deadlines
When it counts as lost, who can claim, and the deadlines nobody reads until too late.
A parcel stops updating. The customer emails. Somewhere in the next few weeks there is money at stake, and most of what decides the outcome happens in the first fortnight.
Tracking silence is usually not loss
The most common panic is a parcel that leaves the origin country and then shows nothing for a week or more.
On a postal route that is expected. Scans stop at export, and the receiving operator often does not publish anything until it takes possession and begins domestic delivery. In between, the parcel is on a plane, in a queue, or with customs, and nobody is scanning it at all. Customs holds are the least visible part of any journey, and they can run to weeks without any event appearing.
So before treating a parcel as lost, check three things: whether it has actually exceeded the carrier’s own stated transit time, whether the last scan is an export event rather than a delivery failure, and whether the destination operator publishes tracking at all. Roughly twenty postal operators publish very little, and their parcels arrive perfectly well while showing nothing.
Delivered, but not received
A different and more frequent problem. Tracking says delivered, the customer says otherwise.
Ask the recipient to check with neighbours, look for a card, and check any safe place or locker the carrier might use, because many carriers deliver to a nominated place without ringing. Then ask the carrier for the delivery detail: most can supply a GPS point, a time, a signature or a photograph. A GPS point at the wrong house is a misdelivery and is straightforwardly the carrier’s problem.
Do not skip this and refund immediately. A misdelivered parcel is usually recoverable in the first days and unrecoverable a month later.
When it officially counts as lost
Nobody will accept a loss claim on day three. Each carrier defines a waiting period after which an item may be declared missing, and it is longer for international than domestic, often substantially. Until that period elapses the item is late, not lost, and the only available action is an enquiry.
An enquiry is worth opening as early as the rules allow. It is what makes somebody physically look, and on postal routes it triggers the origin operator to ask the destination operator, which is a real process with a real answer.
Who is allowed to claim
The sender, in almost every case, even though the recipient is the one without the parcel.
The contract of carriage is between the sender and the carrier. The recipient is not a party to it, and most carriers will not discuss a claim with them. This catches out sellers who tell an unhappy customer to contact the carrier directly: the customer cannot, comes back angrier, and has lost a week.
So the practical position is that the seller owns the problem regardless of where the fault lies. Under consumer law in most of Europe and much of elsewhere, the seller carries the risk until the goods reach the consumer anyway, which means “the courier lost it” is not an answer to a customer.
What a claim needs
Assemble this before you start, because a claim that stalls for missing documents usually stalls past a deadline:
- Proof of posting, and the tracking number.
- Proof of value: the invoice or order confirmation showing what the customer paid, not a self-declared figure.
- The declared customs value, which normally caps compensation on an international item.
- For damage, photographs of the item and of the packaging, plus the packaging itself retained.
- Correspondence with the recipient establishing non-receipt.
Compensation is limited to the lesser of the actual value and the declared or insured value, and postal convention limits can be well below the goods value. Undervaluing a customs declaration caps the claim at the undervalued figure, which is where that shortcut finally presents its bill.
The deadlines
These end more claims than any dispute about fault.
Every carrier sets both a minimum wait before a claim can be made and a maximum period after which it will not be considered. The maximum is typically some months from the date of posting, not from when you noticed, and not from when the customer complained. Damage windows are far shorter, sometimes only a few days from delivery, and a damaged item reported three weeks later is generally refused on timing alone.
Two habits prevent nearly all of this. Note the claim deadline when you post anything valuable, and open the enquiry as soon as the waiting period ends rather than when the customer chases a second time.
Refund the customer first
Whatever the carrier eventually decides, the commercial answer is usually to refund or resend promptly and pursue the claim separately.
The claim may take months and may fail. The customer relationship will not survive being told to wait for it, and in most jurisdictions they are entitled to a remedy from you regardless. Treat the claim as your own recovery, not as something the customer is waiting on.
Reducing how often this happens
Most repeat losses are addressing, not theft. An incomplete address, a missing apartment number, a wrong postcode and a missing state on a country that needs one all cause parcels to fail late in the journey, when they are hardest to recover.
The rest is proportion: use tracked services on anything you would mind losing, insure to the real value, and keep the declared value honest so the ceiling is where it should be.