Post purchase claims

Tracking says delivered. Your customer says it never arrived.

15 September 2026 · 4 minute read

Both things can be true at once, and that is what makes this claim harder than a damaged parcel. A delivery photo, if the carrier took one, shows a box on a doorstep. It does not show who picked it up. Most teams never read past the word delivered.

A delivery scan records one thing: a driver pressed a button on a handheld. Whether a person ended up with the parcel is a separate event, and the gap between the two is where almost every one of these claims lives.

Read the scan history, not the status

The status field says delivered. The scan history says where the parcel was and when. Pull the full history rather than the summary. Four patterns are worth checking every time.

The scan does not line up with the address

Most handheld scanners capture a location with the delivery scan, but carriers rarely publish it in standard tracking. You usually have to open a trace and ask for the delivery location on file. Ask anyway. A scan that lands a few streets away points at the wrong building, and the customer is describing what happened. Small distances tell you nothing. Consumer GPS drifts, and a hundred feet of error in a dense block is normal.

The delivered scan came at an odd moment

A parcel marked delivered twenty minutes after it left the depot, or at 9pm on the last day of a peak week, was more likely scanned in a batch than at the door. That proves nothing by itself.

There is no out for delivery scan at all

A delivered scan with nothing before it on the same day is worth a question, not a verdict. Missing intermediate scans are common on economy services where the last mile is handed to another carrier, and some service levels never generate an out for delivery scan at all. Ask the carrier what device produced the final scan and where.

The billed weight does not match what you shipped

Those adjustments land on your carrier invoice, not in tracking, so nobody looks. A parcel that left you at 4.5 pounds and came back rebilled at 0.8 is a question for the carrier rather than the buyer. It can also be a mismatched scan, so ask before concluding.

Then read the order

The carrier record tells you what happened to the box. The order tells you whether this claim fits a pattern.

• Is this the first order from this address, or the fifth claim from it
• Expedited shipping on a high value item, paid by an account opened the same week
• A message from the customer before the delivery scan, which usually reads as a worried buyer rather than a claim
• How many days passed between the delivery scan and the claim. A claim filed eleven days later is not necessarily false, but it is worth asking what changed on day eleven

None of these prove anything on their own. Together they tell you whether to approve quickly or ask one more question.

What to ask when the record is genuinely ambiguous

Most of the time it will be ambiguous, and that is fine. The point is to find the one question whose answer closes the claim, asked in a way that costs an honest customer thirty seconds. You are not trying to catch anyone.

Hi Dana,

The carrier’s record puts the delivery scan at 4:12pm Tuesday at your building. Before we send a replacement, could you check with anyone else at the address and with the front office, and let us know either way? If it has not turned up by Friday, we will ship a new one.

Two things are doing the work there. The message names a specific fact, so the customer can see you looked rather than stalled. And it puts a date on the resolution, which takes away the reason to argue.

Two things worth fixing upstream

1. Require a signature above a threshold. Work out the value where these claims start to hurt and put signature confirmation above it. It costs a few dollars a parcel, and a signed proof of delivery is the strongest thing you can put in front of a card network if one of these becomes a chargeback.
2. Write the claim window into your policy. If your policy does not say how many days after delivery a not received claim can be filed, you have no ground to stand on when one arrives five weeks later. Seven to fourteen days is a common window. Know what it buys you. It governs your own refunds and store credit. It does not shorten the card networks’ dispute windows, which run months and are not yours to set.

What this is really about

The shape of this problem is the same everywhere. The evidence needed to resolve these claims already exists. It is sitting in the carrier record and in the order history. Reading both properly is something like twenty minutes a claim, and a support queue at volume does not have it.

So the claim gets approved, or it gets denied on a hunch, and neither decision is based on what actually happened.