- Two obligations run in parallel and they are not connected. You owe the customer a working order. The carrier owes you a capped payment, if you file correctly and on time.
- Under section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, goods stay at the trader's risk until the consumer physically has them. A missing parcel is your problem first.
- USPS claims for damage can be filed immediately but never later than 60 days from the mailing date, and most lost mail claims open after 15 days.
- Royal Mail claims for a lost or damaged item in the UK run out at 80 days from posting, and standard first or second class compensation stops at the item's value up to 20 pounds.
- Carriers pay against documents rather than against stories. Proof of posting, proof of value and photographs decide almost every claim.
A tracking page that has said out for delivery since Thursday is one of the few customer messages with no good first reply. You did not lose the parcel. You cannot find it either. The customer does not care about either fact, and under consumer law they are right not to.
What follows is two processes that most sellers run as one and should not. The first is making the customer whole, which happens quickly and on your money. The second is recovering what you can from the carrier, which happens slowly, against documents, and under deadlines that expire quietly.
Who is responsible when a parcel goes missing?
You are, to the customer. The carrier's responsibility runs to you, not to them, and the two have different rules, different limits and different clocks.
Section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 puts it plainly for UK sellers: goods remain at the trader's risk until they come into the physical possession of the consumer, or of someone the consumer identified to receive them. Risk passes earlier only in one narrow case, where the consumer arranged carriage themselves with a carrier the trader did not offer as an option. Even then, the carrier's own liability to that consumer is untouched.
The practical reading is unglamorous. Telling a customer to take it up with the courier is not merely poor service, it misstates the legal position in most consumer sales. Resolve with the customer first, on your timetable, then pursue the claim on the carrier's.
How long do you have to file?
Less time than you think, and the clock usually starts at posting rather than at the moment you notice. Two of the biggest postal operators publish deadlines that sit in roughly the same band, and both of them are shorter than a busy seller's attention span.
For USPS, the claims rules allow a damage or missing contents claim to be filed immediately, but no later than 60 days after the mailing date. For lost items you must wait first: 7 days for Priority Mail Express, 15 days for Priority Mail, Ground Advantage, insured mail and most other domestic services, with the outer limit still 60 days. Military and overseas addresses get longer windows that run to 180 days or a year.
In the UK, the position summarised by Citizens Advice on Royal Mail compensation gives a lost first class item an 11 working day wait before a claim can be made, 14 working days for second class, and an overall deadline of 80 days from posting for both lost and damaged items. International losses stretch to 6 months. Damage claims drop to 14 days where consequential loss insurance was bought.
| Situation | Wait before claiming | Deadline to claim | Typical cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| USPS Priority Mail Express, lost | 7 days | 60 days from mailing | Insured value, receipt required |
| USPS Priority Mail or Ground Advantage, lost | 15 days | 60 days from mailing | Insured value, receipt required |
| Royal Mail first class, lost | 11 working days | 80 days from posting | Stamps plus value up to 20 pounds |
| Royal Mail Tracked 24 or 48, lost | Per service terms | 80 days from posting | Value up to 75 pounds, sender only |
| Any carrier, damage | None, file at once | 60 to 80 days depending on operator | Depends on cover bought |
Both operators also treat damage and loss as separate products with separate rules, which catches sellers out. A parcel that arrives with two of three items inside is a missing contents claim rather than a loss, filed on the damage timetable, which starts immediately. Treating it as a loss and waiting out the standard period can push you past the deadline for the claim you actually had.
Note what the caps mean for an average order. A 20 pound ceiling on standard post covers a candle and not a camera. If your typical order value sits above the cap on the service you use, you are self insuring every parcel without having decided to.
What evidence does a claim actually need?
Three documents, and shops lose claims on the first one more often than on the other two. Proof of posting, proof of value, and for damage, photographs taken before anything is repacked.
USPS requires the original mailing receipt from whoever files, and will accept outer packaging showing sender and addressee with an insured label, or a printed online label record, as evidence of insurance. For value it takes a sales receipt, a paid invoice, a credit card statement, a dealer statement or printed online transaction details. For damage it wants clear photographs and a repair estimate, and it asks that you keep the original packaging rather than reshipping or discarding it.
Royal Mail's path is similar in shape. Proof of posting means a receipt or certificate of posting, and a recipient can use the postmarked packaging instead. Extra compensation on a valuable item needs original proof of value, which can be a receipt, a bank statement, a repair quotation or a payment record.
The failure mode is nearly always operational rather than legal. A seller who prints labels at home and drops parcels in a post box has no proof of posting for any of them, which makes the entire claims route unavailable regardless of what went wrong. Getting a scan at a counter, or using a collection service that generates one, is the cheapest insurance in this whole article.
What should the customer hear while you wait?
A decision, not a status update. The waiting periods above are between you and the carrier, and passing them on to the buyer converts a logistics delay into a service failure they will remember.
Set a threshold and write it down. Below it, replace or refund as soon as the tracking has clearly stalled, usually three to five days past the promised date, and open the carrier claim separately. Above it, tell the customer you are sending a replacement today and that you may ask them to confirm a few details for the claim. Both answers take one message. Neither requires the customer to understand the difference between a delay and a loss.
The promised date is doing a lot of work in that rule, which is a good reason to make sure it is honest in the first place. We went through how to set one you can keep in the delivery date you promise, and an accurate date makes the stalled parcel obvious days earlier than an optimistic one.
One wording trap deserves naming. Never tell a customer the parcel is lost before the carrier's own threshold, because an item marked lost and then delivered creates a second problem where a customer holds goods you have already refunded. Say the delivery has failed and that you are putting it right, which is both true and final.
Who should file the claim, you or the customer?
Usually you, and on some services only you can. The rules differ by operator and by product, which is worth checking once for the services you actually use rather than discovering during an incident.
USPS allows either the sender or the recipient of insured mail to file, with the condition that whoever files holds the original mailing receipt. In practice that means the seller, since the buyer has never seen it. Royal Mail's position as summarised by Citizens Advice is that either party can claim on most services, while for Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 only the sender may do so.
There is a reason to keep it in your hands even where the customer could act. A claim filed by the buyer pays the buyer, which leaves you having already refunded them and holding nothing. Worse, a buyer who files and is refused tends to come back to you angrier than before, having spent two weeks on a process you understood and they did not. Handle it yourself, and ask them only for what you genuinely cannot produce: photographs of damaged packaging as it arrived, and a short written confirmation that nothing was delivered.
Where you drop ship, settle this with the supplier in writing before it happens. The party that posted the parcel holds the proof of posting, so a supplier who ships on your behalf controls your entire claims route and has little incentive to use it. A clause saying they will file or reimburse within a set period costs nothing to agree in advance and is close to impossible to extract afterwards.
What about a parcel that was delivered and the customer says it was not?
That is a different problem with the same symptoms, and the carrier's claim process will not help you. A delivery scan means the carrier considers its job complete, so there is nothing to claim and the decision is entirely yours.
These cases divide roughly into three. Some are genuine: parcels left in the wrong porch, taken from a doorstep, or signed for by a neighbour who forgot. Some are honest confusion, where somebody else in the household collected it. A minority are claims made in the knowledge that the goods arrived, and the published merchant surveys treat this as its own category. In the Riskified benchmarks reported by Internet Retailing, 57% of the 300 large merchants surveyed said costs from item not received abuse had risen year on year, the highest of the four abuse types measured.
The useful response is a policy rather than a judgement each time. Decide what evidence a delivery needs to count as complete, which for most sellers means a photograph at the point of delivery on anything above a value you choose. Carriers offer this on most services now and it converts an unwinnable argument into a two second check. Below that value, refund without investigation, because the staff time costs more than the goods.
Keep a per customer count rather than a per order one. A single disputed delivery tells you nothing. A fourth from the same address is a conversation, and the only defensible way to have it is from a record you were keeping before you needed it.
Do international parcels work differently?
They get longer deadlines and worse odds. Citizens Advice puts the Royal Mail window for an item lost or damaged outside the UK at 6 months from posting, against 80 days domestically, and USPS extends overseas and military windows to 180 days or a year depending on the service.
The longer clock is not generosity, it reflects how long tracing takes once a parcel crosses into another operator's network. A second consequence is that your own customer resolution has to happen far in advance of any recovery, so an international order is effectively uninsured for the first few months no matter what cover you bought.
Two habits reduce the exposure. Declare contents and value accurately, since a mis declared parcel is both slower and harder to claim on. And keep the customs documentation with the order record rather than in a courier portal you may lose access to, because a claim six months later depends on paperwork nobody saved.
Can software do any of this for you?
Yes, in the two places the job is mechanical: noticing and assembling. Neither needs anything clever, and both are where small sellers actually lose money.
Noticing is a monitoring rule, not a model. Flag any shipment whose tracking has not changed for 48 hours past its expected delivery date, and you have the list of claims to open while the windows are still open. Most missed claims are not refused, they are never filed, because nobody looked at an order again after it shipped.
Assembling is where a general purpose model earns its place. Pulling the order, the label record, the payment receipt and the customer's photographs into one claim file, with a short factual description of what happened, is tedious document work of exactly the kind these tools handle well. The same discipline we described for building a dispute evidence file applies here, and the two files overlap enough that building one gives you most of the other.
What software should not do is decide. A claim submitted with an inflated value, or a damage photograph taken after repacking, is a false statement to a carrier and a fast route to an account review. Keep the human on the number and the model on the paperwork.
How do you stop paying for the same loss twice?
By separating the claim from the customer resolution in your own books, and by watching patterns rather than individual parcels. One loss is bad luck. Four losses on the same lane in a month is a routing decision waiting to be made.
Track three numbers per carrier and per service: loss rate, damage rate and claim recovery rate. The third one is the surprise for most sellers. A carrier with a slightly higher loss rate and a fast, reliable claims process can be cheaper in practice than a carrier that rarely loses anything and pays out slowly on a technicality. You can only see that after a year of keeping the numbers, which is the argument for starting now rather than at the next price negotiation.
Packaging sits underneath the damage half of this. Claims for damage are routinely refused where the packaging was judged inadequate for the contents, and the seller usually finds this out on the fifth claim rather than the first. Over packing costs a little on every parcel and that cost is visible, while under packing costs a lot on a few parcels and that cost is invisible until it lands. The billing mechanics that push sellers toward smaller boxes are worth knowing before you make that trade, and we set them out in how couriers bill you for air.
Finally, decide consciously whether to insure. For a shop whose average order sits comfortably under the standard cap, the included cover is enough and extra insurance is a slow leak. For anything above it, the choice is between paying a few percent per parcel and accepting a full loss several times a year. Both are defensible. Drifting into the second without noticing is not, and that is what most sellers do until the first expensive parcel disappears. If you want those thresholds to live in your own order flow rather than in your head, that is a rule your storefront can hold alongside the shipping options.